Toby Wheeler: 8th Grade Bench Warmer

This review (or an edited version of it) originally ran in The Edge of the Forest/

Toby Wheeler: Eighth Grade Benchwarmer by Thatcher Heldring (Delacorte Press, August 2007)

Toby is just your average gym-rat, playing basketball down at the rec center whenever he gets a chance. When the junior high’s new basketball coach sees him play, he invites Toby to join the team. Toby’s never been one for the organized play of the school team, but maybe joining the team will help repair his friendship with JJ, the team’s star. Toby and JJ used to be best friends, but this summer JJ’s been growing distant and leaving Toby further and further behind.

Joining the team only creates more problems than it solves. Toby’s regulated to the bench and his attitude isn’t winning him any points with JJ, who continues to drift away. Toby’s budding relationship with the coach’s daughter Megan just creates further tension.

There’s also an odd subplot that pits Toby’s dad (who works for the lumber company) against his mother (an environmental activist).

Toby’s relationship with JJ is one we don’t see enough of in tween literature. Toby’s first person narration captures the confusion of changing friendship while still believably sounding like an eighth grade boy. Also, the budding relationship with Megan is handled in such a way to still be a “boy book.”

Overall, it’s a done, yet still heart-warming sports story about a guy learning the meaning of teamwork, a coach remembering how to play for the love of the game instead of winning, and a really killer basket right at the buzzer. A good bet for sports stories fans in the 10-14 age range.

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Pick-Up Game

Pick-Up Game: A Full Day of Full Court ed. by Marc Aronson and Charles R Smith, Jr.

9 poems, 9 photographs, 9 stories, 10 authors, 2 editors, and 1 full day of basketball.

These short stories follow the action of a day of basketball at the Cage, which is the West 4th Street Court near Washington Square in Manhattan. We have new players, good players, bad players, players who talk a good game, girls who want to know players, film students, friends, and old-timers watching the action, shooting the balls and shooting the breeze.

There's more than enough basketball action here to entice your reluctant readers with a good sports book, but the writing, diversity of characters and voices (in every single way), and different takes on the same people and events will draw in your anti-sports book people. I mean, you're looking at writers like Walter Dean Myers, Sharon G. Flake, Joseph Bruchac, Adam Rapp and Rita Garcia-Williams. How can you NOT find something to enjoy about this?

I especially enjoyed Charles R. Smith Jr's poems and photos that started each story. They helped keep the action moving as we shifted focus and voice, but I also enjoyed how different the poems were-- different styles and voices and perspectives as well. The photographs were a great design addition.

There are reoccurring characters in the book and I like Aronson's note at the end that gives some of the history (and the real-life legends mentioned) as well as a bit about the process. Aronson and Smith chose the setting and date and gave each author a time slot. Author's couldn't start writing until the story before theirs was done, so they knew who was on the court and who was playing well that day. A great way to write a collaboration that turned out really well.

Book Provided by... my local library

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