25 June 2010
Book Review: Linda Sue Park’s Keeping Score
Filed under reading
Keeping Score by Linda Sue Park
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I love baseball. Love it in that geeky way that even most baseball fans don’t love it. I keep score when I watch games in person or on television. When I travel to the continental United States I bring my scorebook with me in case I see a game. So when I heard that Newbery laureate Linda Sue Park wrote a book about keeping score, I knew I had to read it.
Maggie is an elementary-schooler who, like almost everyone in her neighborhood in the early 1950s, is a Brooklyn Dodgers fan. She spends afternoons listening to games on the radio with her friends at the local fire station. A young firemen named Jim introduces Maggie to the intellectually stimulating practice of keeping score. Maggie is so hooked that she invents new notations to record game events for which no established traditional notations exist.
It would be a shame if the baseball stuff in this book prevents readers from getting through it, because it’s not a book about baseball; it’s a book about growing up during wartime. Maggie’s friend Jim is drafted for service in the Korean war, and with fierce loyalty and determination, Maggie does what she can in her sixth-grade way to support him until he can return. Not content only to send CARE packages, she attempts to understand as much about the war as she can in search of a way to help bring him back.
Linda Sue Park writes a touching story that should appeal to middle- and late-elementary school readers who can appreciate Maggie’s passion even if they don’t sympathize. I would encourage such readers not to focus on the baseball part of Maggie’s obsession but on the aspects of the game that appeal to her, or at the very least to endure the first half of the book until it becomes no longer a book about baseball. Unlike other Park books I’ve read, I don’t think older middle-schoolers or high-schoolers are likely to respond well to the writer’s voice in this novel, which definitely slants younger.
2010-06-25 :: me