Author: Nic Stone
Genre: realistic fiction
Similar books: Bump by Matt Wallace
My Life as a Diamond by Jenny Manzer
Rating:
Summary (provided by publisher): Shenice Lockwood, captain of the Fulton Firebirds, is hyper-focused when she steps up to the plate. Nothing can stop her from leading her team to the U12 fast-pitch softball regional championship. But life has thrown some curveballs her way.
Strike one: As the sole team of all-brown faces, Shenice and the Firebirds have to work twice as hard to prove that Black girls belong at bat.
Strike two: Shenice’s focus gets shaken when her great-uncle Jack reveals that a career-ending—and family-name-ruining—crime may have been a setup.
Strike three: Broken focus means mistakes on the field. And Shenice’s teammates are beginning to wonder if she’s captain-qualified.
It's up to Shenice to discover the truth about her family’s past—and fast—before secrets take the Firebirds out of the game forever.
My opinion: I'm not real big on sports stories but I'll give them a chance if I get the sense that they're trying to be more, that sports are used as a device for addressing a larger issue. And that's definitely the case here. The girls play softball but we don't get much technical sports talk or even descriptions of the games. Softball is simply a thing they do and a catalyst for addressing institutionalized racism. Those ideas - including how increased awareness changes Shenice's approach to games and her teammates - are morally complex and are thus not fully explored. The conclusion is pretty idealized and tidy. It ends quickly with everything neatly tied up, a result I found disappointing. Still, it will give a middle grade reader plenty to chew on.
Advanced Reader Copy provided by NetGalley
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