Nonfiction Monday Review: Curveball: The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone... by Martha Ackmann

Found via: the Amelia Bloomer Project

The full title of this book is Curveball: The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone the First Woman to Play Professional Baseball in the Negro League. Can you see why I abbreviated it?

Today is Labor Day in the US, the traditional marker of the end of summer. While baseball continues for a few more weeks before the World Series, since it's considered a summer sport I thought a baseball biography would be an excellent way to finish out the season.

I've mentioned my love of the game on here a few times, but I have a confession: I don't know much of the history of baseball. My dad knows a ton, at least when it comes to his favorite team, the Braves (boo!), but I tend to focus on the contemporary game. This is probably because a) while I enjoy baseball, my love of the game doesn't run terribly deep and b) when it comes to history, I tend to stick to women's history. Since women have historically been excluded from baseball, the means most of my baseball history concerns the AAGPBL. When I saw this book nominated for the Amelia Bloomer list, I knew I had to read it, since I knew nothing about Negro League baseball, and especially didn't know they'd had a woman play!

Marcenia Lyle Stone, aka Tomboy aka Toni, grew up in Minneapolis in the 20s and 30s and loved nothing more than baseball. She worked hard to prove her stuff and with a bit of persistence and cajoling, she played throughout her childhood on neighborhood boys teams - even going so far once as to knock a decade off of her age in order to qualify for a baseball camp taught by a former pro player!

The odds were stacked against Toni, and she knew it. Not only was she a woman who wanted to play a man's game, but when she was first trying to break into just the minor leagues, baseball was a white man's game - it would be a few years before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier. But Toni didn't let her race or her gender hold her back, and she made it on to some of the top ranked teams in the Negro League, just as the league was beginning to die out as segregation was eliminated in Major League Baseball and their minor league farm teams.

This is an amazing biography - as I tweeted after finishing the book, Toni Stone is my new hero. Gutsy might be the best adjective for her. Determined. Tenacious. She is an excellent example of what you can accomplish if you follow your dreams, but her story also emphasizes that those accomplishments only came after years of hard work and dedication. Nothing was easy for Toni Stone.

This is also an excellent history of baseball and Jim Crow laws in the mid-century South. There's lots of anecdotes about the history of the Negro Leagues as well as stories from some of the first black Major League players like Jackie Robinson and Hank Aaron that are sure to appeal to any hardcore baseball fan. I had no idea that much of the Negro League play was in the form of Barnstorming matches, where a team would travel all across the country playing exhibition games, making their season stretch from April to November. It makes modern baseball look like a luxury cruise!

Toni spent a lot of her professional time in the South, first as part of her time as a Barnstormer travelling through the region and then playing semi-pro with the Louisiana Creole team. As such we get a first hand view of the terrible and ridiculous Jim Crow laws that were in place. Legal action was threatened in some states if a Negro League team played a white team - or even an integrated team (Jackie Robinson led a touring all star team, made up of white and black players). I have to admit, I never realized how much Jim Crow laws could affect whites as well. I don't say this as some sort of derailing, "racism hurts white people too!" comment, but rather as someone who is realizing in a new way just how much those laws were rooted in fear and hatred. I thought the laws were simply to keep Black people "in their place" while whites had free reign and could go anywhere and do whatever they wanted, but at least when it came to baseball, even if they wanted to play together, the law said they had to be kept strictly separate.

What a scary and terrifying time it must have been.

This is definitely a must-read for any baseball fan or sports history buff. It's an adult title but relatively short (less than 300 pages with a hefty bibliography/notes section in the back) and perfectly appropriate for high school or middle school student suddenly stuck inside for school when she'd rather be playing ball!


This week Nonfiction Monday is hosted by The Miss Rumphius Effect. Be sure to stop by and check out all the other great nonfiction posts this week!

Review: Last Night I Sang to the Monster by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Found via: Best Fiction for Young Adults 2011 nominations



While I have mixed feelings about the existence of the new BFYA list, one thing I am very positive about is Last Night I Sang to the Monster deserves to be on all sorts of "best of" lists. It's nominated for the Nerds Heart YA contest and I hope it goes far! This is definitely a title that needs more exposure.



At 18 years old, Zach is already in rehab for alcoholism. He was brought in for treatment after suffering severe alcohol poisoning, and claims to not remember what happened just before his last drinking binge. He knows it was bad, and remembering just hurts too much. Instead he drifts through the program, remaining silent most of the time, only opening up occasionally to his roommate Rafael. Rafael is also an alcoholic, but is about old enough to be Zach's father, and is much more at peace with the rehab program than Zach is.

As Zach makes his way through the rehabilitation program in fits and starts, we learn about his life before rehab - living with a brother with anger issues and an alcoholic father who hid bottles of booze where Zach could easily find them. Adam, Zach's ever-patient therapist, helps guide Zach through his journey, but Zach is the one who must choose to be sober, and in rehab there are no easy answers.

I have so much love for everything that's going on in this book. While there are several colorful supporting characters, none of them fall into outlandish stereotype territory. Every patient clearly has addiction issues, but they are all handling sobriety in their own ways. Some have come to the center voluntarily like Rafael, but others are there on court order and plan on staying just long enough to avoid jail time before returning to their old ways.

This is also an extremely chatty novel. Zach spends a lot of time in his own head and fills the narrative with vocal tics like well, so, look and okay. It's never enough to become annoying, and it definitely adds a sense of intimacy to this story. The casual tone makes it feel very raw and immediate, like we really are in Zach's head and he hasn't had time to censor or edit himself.

One thing that really impressed me about this novel is that even though most of the cast is male, there is a lot of crying going on. Zach cries with some frequency, as do other patients and doctors. But what's striking about all of these tears is no one is torn down for it. No one is called a fag or is told that he's crying like a girl - Zach doesn't even think these things about himself. Considering how men are so often socialized to see emotions, especially ones that lead to crying, as un-manly, I thought this was remarkable. Also, Zach is Latino, and Latino cultures are often portrayed as steeped in machismo that would also discourage tears. It's always a positive thing to see difficult emotions and emotional reactions handled respectfully and realistically.

I was also impressed by Zach's journey in rehab. Without giving too much away, I can safely say that Zach's road to recovery isn't so much a clear path as it is a roller coaster. He doesn't progressively get better - at least not obviously. His story is much more along the lines of "one step forward, two steps back." While sometimes it's frustrating to see Zach slip backwards in some way, it's also great to a complex look at alcoholism and recovery.

Speaking of complex, after checking out Last Night I Sang to the Monster, I recommend checking out Liz B's list at Teacozy Beyond Pap Finn for other YA novels where "an alcoholic (including recovering alcoholic) is portrayed as something other than the evil, abusive person." A great list!

Double Review: The Dark Days of Hamburger Halpin by Josh Berk and All Unquiet Things by Anna Jarzab by

Hamburger Halpin found via Publisher's Weekly 1/18
All Unquiet Things found via Tea Cozy

On the surface it looks like I'm stretching for this Double Review pairing, but hear me out! While The Dark Days of Hamburger Halpin is a dark comedy and All Unquiet Things is a noir-ish murder mystery, at the center of both stories is the murder of a young classmate. How each novel handles that murder, and tracking down the killer, however, couldn't be more different.

In The Dark Days of Hamburger Halpin, the Will "Hamburger" Halping has decided it's time to ditch "deaf school" and join mainstream classes at the local high school. He's fairly adept at reading lips, but being new, disabled, and overweight all combine to work against Will when it comes to making friends. His only social prospect is perpetual dweeb Devon Smiley. Will does his best to ignore Devon, despite the latter's eager attempts at communication, including learning to finger spell and sign some basic phrases so Will doesn't have to read his lips all the time. The two join forces and forge a friendship in the aftermath of a tragic accident at a coal mine during a school trip where a popular classmate died. Or was it an accident? Will and Devon take it upon themselves, roping in Ebony, Devon's friend from his deaf school days (and who just narrowly avoids falling into the "sassy black friend", to solve the crime, relying on Will's & Ebony's lip reading abilities to surreptitiously gather information. Their investigation takes them through all the rungs of the high school social ladder, uncovering secrets and petty gossip the popular kids would rather remain quiet, until the startling reveal of whodunnit.

All Unquiet Things also has a murder at its center: Carly, Neily's ex-girlfriend and Audrey's cousin. Months after Carly's murder, Neily has come to terms with her death (as well as you can when someone you love has been brutally murdered) - until Audrey shows up in school again after an extended absence, saying that her father - Carly's uncle - wasn't guilty, and she wants Neily's help to uncover the true suspect. Through alternating sections, we see the investigation unfold through Neily's and Audrey's perspectives as the two start sticking their noses where they don't belong, tangling with teenage drug dealers and stalkers, while trying to uncover the motive and the guilty party that snatched Carly from their lives all too soon.

I enjoyed Hamburger Halpin for about 99% of the book - until the murderer and motive was revealed. My dislike of the conclusion was only heightened after reading All Unquiet Things which took a very similar tactic and treated it with seriousness and respect. I'm trying to be circumspect here so as not to spoil the ending for either book, but the murderer and motivation in Hamburger Halpin feels totally out of place in a comedic book. I'm all for dark comedy, but the conclusion comes out of nowhere and the very serious motivation is treated like an afterthought that just totally ruined the end.

All Unquiet Things, on the other hand, builds the mystery slowly over the course of the book, with multiple suspects investigated, so that when the big reveal is finally made it feels like we've really been on the investigation with Neily and Audrey. The final few scenes at the climax are tremendously tense and were everything a person could ask for in a dramatic murder mystery.

In Hamburger Halpin's favor, I did enjoy reading about a deaf protagonist, even if I felt the communication difficulties were overcome rather quickly. Until Devon procures smartphones for text messaging for both of them, a lot of communication is done via notebook paper. Have you ever tried to carry on a conversation by writing everything down? It drives you crazy (I did this in high school during the Day of Silence). Also I thought it was a little convenient that Will rarely missed important words while lip reading. Luckily, Will is a fun character, so I didn't mind spending so much of the book inside of his head with just his observations to carry the story until he and Devon become friends.

Has anyone else read either title? What did you think of the big reveals?

Review: Tales of the Madman Underground by John Barnes

Found via: BBYA 2010 nominations
Winner: Printz Honor 2010

This book is 532 pages long and it covers one week in 1973. Harry Potter books that are almost twice that length cover an entire school year. Of course, the Harry Potter books skip over vast periods of time in the course of the school year, whereas almost every minute of every day is accounted for here.

In other words, this is a rather detailed book.

Tales of the Madman Underground starts on September 5, 1973, the first day of Karl Shoemaker's senior year of high school and the start of Operation Be Fucking Normal. A tall order for someone who's been in therapy since middle school thanks to his dad's death from cancer and his mom's reputation as a drunken slut.

But Karl has a plan for senior year: if he can be normal one day at a time (a lesson learned from his Alcoholics Anonymous meetings), he can last long enough into the semester to make sure none of his teachers recommend he return to therapy.

But being normal is harder than it looks. After all, if you've never been normal, how do you know what you're supposed to do? Should he continue to hang out with all of his old friends, his fellow therapy members that make up the so-called Madman Underground? Or should he turn his back on all of them, including his best friend since forever? Matters are complicated by the appearance of Marti, a new girl with frizzy hair and no boobs - definitely not the sort of girl a "normal" guy would be hanging out with.

Plus there are some parts of Karl's life that are decidedly not normal, like working five jobs in order to ensure he and his mom can continue to eat. And having to hide that money in various stashes around the house so his mom can't find it and use it to go on a booze and pot bender while looking for her next hook up.

Karl has to balance home and friends, pushy and obnoxious teachers, small town and internal prejudices. All in his quest to be fucking normal.

This book was a little tough to get into, because I kept waiting for something to happen. Nothing major ever does, so if you're looking for a mind-bending thriller, look elsewhere. This is very much a week-in-the-life book - it doesn't even appear to be an out of the ordinary week, aside from Karl's attempts to be "normal" and the introduction of new-girl Marti to the small town school. Less than half way through however I began to enjoy the ride for what it was, liking this glimpse into the past.

Barnes deals deftly with a lot of the social inequity of the time. Casual racism and homophobia run rampant in this small Ohio town, even among friends. This isn't the wild and crazy and totally open 70s we often think about, but small town 70s where people looked upon the changes going on in the wider world with suspicion. Karl's mother is a total hippie in some ways, calling Karl a "special child of the universe" and saying that the age of Aquarius truly is coming upon them, but it's also clear most of the town thinks she's a nut.

I would imagine it might be hard for younger readers to comprehend the large amount of casual abuse in this story - lots of kids are regularly beaten by their parents or sexually abused by family members or locked out of their houses, and "everyone" knows about these incidents but no one really tries to stop them. They just throw the victims in therapy and call it good. The only reason I could buy it is Lightsburg, Ohio doesn't sound too different from the town my parents grew up in and Mom used to tell me some sad stories about kids showing up in school with black eyes and broken arms and everyone would know it was the mom or dad hitting the kid, but it was considered a private family issue. So kudos to Barnes for capturing a lot of the small but major tragedies of the time.

I couldn't tell you exactly why this was a Printz honor book. It's certainly very good, but I don't think I'm the best judge of what makes a Printz-worthy book. I tried reading Jellicoe Road after it won last year, and couldn't even get a third of the way through it. I can definitely, however, see this appealing to adult readers of YA, as the style feels very much like adult literary fiction. At least the little adult literary fiction I've read - have to admit, my reading tastes are definitely stalled at where they were when I was 16.

On the jacket copy: I have no idea why the jacket is designed with big old censor bars. It kind of implies the book is going to be about censorship in some way. There's a brief point about a teacher refusing to censor his teaching of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (so long as you're quoting the book he sees no problem with the racial slurs - it's when you call another person that outside of a literary context that it becomes a problem). So the gratuitous and obvious censoring of the jacket copy comes a little bit out of nowhere.

Review: Blue Plate Special by Michelle D. Kwasney

Found via BBYA 2010 nominations

Note to self: when going on a weekend outing with your mother, don't take along a book about girls who have less-than-stellar relationships with their mothers! Sure, it might make you appreciate your own mother more, but what a downer!

Madeline, Desiree and Ariel are three very different young women growing up in three very different times. Madeline is quiet and overweight in 1977, the defacto head of the family since her father is gone and her mother prefers to spend the welfare checks on alcohol. Desiree, getting ready to graduate from high school in 1993, tells her story through poetry (and I didn't hate it!), as she tries to avoid her mother and her mother's skeezy boyfriend, finding her only refuge in her high school sweetheart. Ariel, the contemporary girl in 2009, has a workaholic for a mother and is throwing herself at Shane, her new boyfriend that wants her to spend all of her time with him - and only him.

Like I hinted at above, this book is a bit melancholy, but ultimately thoroughly enjoyable.

I always find it supremely satisfying when I reach the end of a book and can sit back and appreciate just how finely crafted the book is. There are complex books out there that can feel like they're being complex just for the sake of complexity; there are others that are exciting and breathtaking but don't necessarily feel like they were crafted. It took me a little bit to really feel immersed in Blue Plate Special, probably because the chapters alternate between three different young women in three different decades, but at the end you can't help but appreciate how deftly Kwasney has woven their stories together.

Review: Ivy by Julie Hearn

... It's inauguration day. I have no clever lead in to this summary and review.

Ivy has lead a hard life, even by the low standards of Paradise Row. Orphaned as a young child and left to live with her invalid aunt and scheming cousin, Ivy has suffered more than her fair share of humiliation and abuse by the age of five, when we first meet her. She has fiery red hair and oddly colored eyes, quite unlike her aunt's family. When Ivy is given the chance to attend school with her favorite younger cousin, she is wary, but is excited to get out from under her aunt's wrath.

But school isn't any better for Ivy. Humiliated by her teacher and other workers at the school, Ivy runs away on her first day and falls in with a "skinner" - someone who literally steals the clothes off of people's backs - called Carroty Kate. After Ivy lies to Carroty and tells her she has no home to return to, Carroty takes Ivy under her wing and the two become an inseparable pair - to the mild chagrin of the others in Carroty's gang of n'er-do-wells.

In order to keep Ivy calm in the early days of the partnership, Carroty Kate introduces her to the soothing effects of laudanum - the drug that, ten years later when the story picks back up, with Ivy back under the care of her aunt and cousins, Ivy has a terrible addiction to.

Now Ivy spends much of her time in a laudanum-induced daze. To the endless contempt of her family, Ivy doesn't contribute to the family business (either pulling scams or selling flowers) - she's too doped up. She hasn't told them where she spent the two years she had disappeared.

Despite the heavy drug use, Ivy's unique appearance has grown into a sort of a beauty as she has aged. In the market one day she attracts the attention of an artist, Oscar Fosdick, who insists that she become his new model for his paintings. With the promise of a generous salary, Ivy's family sign her up for the job.

And here's where the conflicts begin: from the first day, Ivy and Oscar's mother are constantly at odds. Another (more famous) artist lives next door, and finds Ivy to be the spitting image of his late wife (who died after an overdose of laudanum) - and as another layer of intrigue, his young servant is quite smitten with Ivy as well. Ivy is increasingly unhappy in her work as a model - both because it is tedious work and the constant harassment from Mrs. Fosdick - but her chances for happiness seem to be foiled at every turn.

Lots of reviews are comparing this to Dickens. I have to admit that I haven't really read any Dickens, but I kept feeling like, at least in narrative style, I was reading Jane Eyre. I kept expecting the page to read something along the lines of "Reader, I married him." Thankfully nothing that obvious came up, but this does seem to be a rather meta novel - the narrator is very aware that she/he is conveying a story.

In the author's note at the end, Hearn explains that she was inspired by a real life painting that appears in the novel, and wanted to, in a way, create a better life for the ill-fated subject of that painting. However, I found that explanation rather jolting - the painting appears rather late in the story, so it seemed like an odd point of inspiration. Additionally, the "better life" Hearn tried to create comes about rather conveniently at the last moment.

Overall, this book felt extremely flat. I had small problems with everything from the narrative style to the motivations of various characters. Individually, my issues are in fact rather small, but considering there are so many of them they add up to a less-than-thrilling novel.