Hoop Girlz Challenge Trade Book Grade 5: Harcourt School Publishers Storytown (Rdg Prgm 08/09/10 Wt) - Softcover

Hsp

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0153651644 ISBN 13: 9780153651649

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin School, 2006

Synopsis

When ten-year-old River, who is crazy about basketball, is not chosen to play in the tournament set up in the town of Azalea, Oregon, she decides to organize a team of her own and accepts the help of her older brother.

About this title

About the Author

Lucy Jane Bledsoe is a novelist and science writer. When she's not writing, she's sea kayaking in Alaska, backpacking in the Rockies, or backcountry skiing in the Sierras. When she's not kayaking, hiking, or skiing, she's reading. Her novels have been translated into Japanese, Spanish, and German, and her stories into Dutch and Chinese. Her fiction has won a California Arts Council Individual Fellowship in Literature, an American Library Association Award for Literature, and has been a three-time finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. She's also won a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award, a National Endowment for the Humanities Youthgrant, a Barbara Deming Memorial Money for Women grant, a Puffin Foundation grant, and two National Science Foundation Artists and Writers in Antarctica Fellowships. Bledsoe has traveled to Antarctica three times. The first two times she went as a recipient of the National Science Foundation's Artists and Writers in Antarctica fellowship, living and working at McMurdo Station, Palmer Station, and Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, as well as in field camps in the Transantarctic mountains. She spent time with scientists studying penguins, seals, global warming, and the Big Bang. Bledsoe's work has been widely published in anthologies and periodicals, such as MS., NEWSDAY, FICTION INTERNATIONAL, ZYZZYVA, BLOOM, LODESTAR QUARTERLY, WIG MAGAZINE, GIRLFRIENDS, BLITHE HOUSE QUARTERLY, CALIFORNIA WILD, and NORTHWEST LITERARY FORUM. Her science writing includes CD-ROM scripts for NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC and The George Lucas Education Foundation, as well as curriculum for the SETI Institute's Voyages Through Time project.

From Booklist

Gr. 5-7. Eleven-year-old River Borowitz-Jacobs, a sixth-grader in tiny Azaela, Oregon, dreams of playing basketball in the WNBA, just like her idol, Emily Hargraves, also from Azaela. She thinks she's on her way when the new high-school coach announces the formation of a sixth-grade girls team that will compete in a tournament with teams from other nearby towns; the most valuable player in the tournament will get to meet Hargraves and attend her basketball camp. Emily's dreams appear derailed when she is cut from the "A" team, but she gathers together the other rejects, including a wheelchair-bound girl with a terrific outside shot, and forms Hoop Girlz, dedicated to having fun. The setup smacks of yet another version of Bad News Bears, but Bledsoe cleverly avoids most of the cliches, not only by varying the ending but also by injecting lots of against-the-grain subplots, including River's hopelessly uncool parents, artists and latter-day hippies who don't believe in competition and eat bee pollen. The basketball scenes are well constructed and realistic, the humor is fresh, and the characters are believable. Good fun for hoop girls and boys alike. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin School
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0153651644
• ISBN 13: 9780153651649
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 176