Bat 6

An important softball game--called Bat 6--which takes place in 1948 between two teams of sixth-grade girls explodes catastrophically because of the prejudice surrounding two new girls who are "different."

Grade 5-7ASince the turn of the century, two rival Oregon farm communities have put their differences behind them and come together once a year to watch their sixth-grade girls' teams play softball. In the spring of 1949, the "50-year girls" excitedly anticipate their moment of glory. Bat 6 is their story, reconstructed just after it happened. The narrative is comprised of firsthand reporting from girls on both sides. This year, each team has a ringer. For the Bear Creek Ridge Mountaineers, it's Japanese-American first-baseman Aki, whose family has just moved back to the community after spending most of the war years in an internment camp. The Barlow Pioneers' marvel is their center fielder who calls herself Shazam, a troubled youngster who does everything, except her schoolwork, with an unsettling, single-minded intensity. Her father was killed at Pearl Harbor and she has maintained a deep-seeded hatred of the Japanese ever since. In the book's pivotal scene, Shazam violently attacks Aki during the big game, and play (and time itself, for that matter) is suspended. The period details and use of the vernacular are right on the money and always reflect the adolescent female point of view. At some point comes the liberating realization that it isn't necessary to keep the multiple voices straight and that the well-crafted account has taken on a life of its own. Wolff delves into the irreversible consequences of war and the necessity to cultivate peace and speaks volumes about courage, responsibility, and reconciliationAall in a book about softball.ALuann Toth, School Library Journal
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Wolff's (Make Lemonade) ambitious but ultimately unsuccessful novel explores prejudice via a baseball game between the sixth grade girls of Bear Creek Ridge and Barlow Road Grade Schools on May 28, 1949. "Now that it's over, we are telling. We voted to, it's fairer than not," begins Tootie, the catcher for Bear Creek Ridge, in what appears to be the start of a series of flashback testimonials. But not all of the 21 girls' accounts adhere to this format, and readers never discover whom the girls are addressing. Some of the characters speak only a few times, and since readers never get to know them, their voices run together in a miscellany. The actual conflict?when Shazam, whose father died at Pearl Harbor, in a run to first base, assaults Aki, the Japanese first baseman?occurs more than halfway through the book. The most distinct voices belong to Shazam (who speaks in a stream-of-consciousness style, "Sneaky Japs never warned nobody they snuck behind our backs dropped bombs right in my fathers ship the Arizona he was down in it without no warning") and to Aki, whose perspective is markedly different from the other girls'. Shazam exposes much of her troubled background through her narratives, and Aki reveals some fascinating cultural details as well as provides insight into life in an internment camp. However, because readers are only acquainted with the two through a few lengthy accounts interspersed among the other 19 girls, the change in both of them (especially in Shazam) at story's end seems sudden and hollow. While readers cannot help but admire the stalwart Aki, they will likely walk away from this book trying to make sense of who these characters were and what they were trying to say. Ages 10-13.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In Bear Creek Ridge and Barlow, two small Oregon towns, everyone is looking forward to the Bat 6 girls' softball game of 1949. Both towns make plans to cheer the sixth graders on, all in the name of good, clean fun. This simple, small-town portrait of Americana is shattered, however, when a racial incident occurs at the 50th annual game: One player, Shirley, whose father was killed at Pearl Harbor, slams her elbow into the face of Aki, a Japanese-American. It brings the game to a halt, and inspires the townspeople to debate and examine what exactly has gone wrong in the years since WW II ended. Guilt hangs over both towns: Could anyone have prevented the incident? Shirley had not concealed her hatred of ``Japs,'' yet no one had believed that such a troubled girl would act on her feelings. Through the first-person narrations of the 21 girls of the two teams, the story emerges, and while few of the voices are truly distinct, their emotions and perspectives ring true. Wolff (Make Lemonade, 1993, etc.) is especially deft in creating a transforming, bittersweet post-war atmosphere and winning portraits of members of the communities who support, respect, and encourage their young girls, but come to question their own roles in the tragedy. (Fiction. 12-14) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Gr. 5^-9. Three years after the end of World War II, 11-year-old Aki Mikami and her family return to their home and orchard in Bear Creek Ridge. They've been gone for six years--since the day in 1942 when they were forced to join tens of thousands of other Americans of Japanese ancestry in internment camps. Coinciding with their return, the Japanese-hating Shazam, whose father died at Pearl Harbor, comes to live with her grandmother in the nearby town of Barlow. The ultimate, explosive meeting of the two girls on a softball field as members of opposing sixth-grade teams will demonstrate that wars may end, but the passions they foster--if unexamined--can make victims of the survivors. This ambitious novel is told in 21 different first-person voices; each member of the two girls' softball teams has one or more "turns" at bat as narrator, recounting bits and pieces of the story. Inevitably, a few of the voices sound distractingly similar, but a gratifyingly large number reveal complex, fully realized characters. Gradually, their individual vignettes merge into an extraordinarily artful portrait of a moment in American history that challenged our comfortable assumptions about who we were and what we believed. None of the 21 girls emerges unchanged from what happens during that fateful encounter nor, one predicts, will most readers of this powerful novel. Michael Cart