Year of the Historical: Brookyln Nine

The Brooklyn Nine Alan Gratz

9 generations of a family, 9 short stories from each one, 9 innings of baseball.

We meet the garment industry workers on Lower East Side tenements in the 1840s, Civil War soldiers, numbers runners, and All-American Girls Baseball League players. The Schneiders move from Manhattan to Brooklyn, they change their name to Snider, baseball is codified as a sport, the Dodgers move to LA. The family confronts racism in baseball and is the victim of anti-semetism. They fear the Russians and Sputnik, and one of them pitches a perfect game.

There is much more baseball in this book than in Samurai Shortstop, but I liked this one even better. Gratz perfectly captures these slices of America-- the people, the time, the culture, the fears, as well as giving us a history of the game. These are short stories, one for each generation, but in a matter of a few pages, we come to love a character (and I loved it when they appeared again in later stories as parents and grand-parents.)

And of course, the archivist librarian in me loves the story of how, in 2002, Snider Flint tries to trace the provenance of one baseball bat and then tries to authenticate his findings. But, my favorite story was how in 1926, when Frankie Snider runs numbers for the crime boss Mickie Fist. It broke my heart that in the next story, Frankie who was such a whiz at math, only got to finally be an engineer when all the boys went off to war.

Over all, super fantastic.

Book Provided by... my local library

Links to Amazon are an affiliate link. You can help support Biblio File by purchasing any item (not just the one linked to!) through these links. Read my full disclosure statement.

Year of the Historical: Samurai Shortstop

Samurai Shortstop Alan Gratz

Toyo Shimada lives in a changing Tokyo, in a changing Japan at the end of the nineteenth century. Japan is teetering between tradition and new Western ideas and inventions. Toyo embodies this, the new Japanese man, while his father is of the old school, which causes much tension.

At his elite boarding school, Toyo lives in fear of the ritual hazing by the older students, and desperately hopes to make the baseball team. For, at it's heart, this is a baseball novel, and one your sports books fan will love. But at the same time, Toyo's father is teaching him the ancient way of the Samurai, a way of life Toyo tries to fit into this new world. Baseball might be the bridge.

The baseball parts I could honestly take or leave, but I love how accurate Toyo is. He doesn't always do what we expect a hero of a teen book to do, which is great, because so often in historical fiction, we have a hero that is essentially modern shoved into a different time and place. When Gratz needs to make the decision between "likable hero" and "historically and culturally accurate person" he goes with accuracy. I loved the portrait of a changing country and the class issues that were explored, and the cultural tensions between the Japanese and Americans. There's enough here to give it to your reader who usually can't stand sports books.

Super Fantastic.

Book Provided by... my local library

Links to Amazon are an affiliate link. You can help support Biblio File by purchasing any item (not just the one linked to!) through these links. Read my full disclosure statement.