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The Pitcher

“I never knew I had an arm until this guy called out, “Hey you want to try and get a ball in the hole, sonny?” I was only nine, but mom said, “come on, let’s play.” This Carney guy with no teeth and a fuming cigarette hands me five blue rubber balls and says if I throw three in the hole we win a prize. He’s grinning, because he took mom’s five bucks and figures a sucker is born every minute. That really got me, because we didn’t have any money after Fernando took off, and he only comes back to beat up mom and steal our money. So I really wanted to get mom back something, you know, for her five bucks.”

A boy with a golden arm but no money for lessons. A mother who wants to give her son his dream before she dies. A broken down World Series pitcher who cannot go on after the death of his wife. These are the elements of The Pitcher. A story of a man at the end of his dream and a boy whose dream is to make his high school baseball team. In the tradition of The Natural and The Field of Dreams, this is a mythic story about how a man and a boy meet in the crossroads of their life and find a way to go on. You will laugh and you will cry as The Pitcher and Ricky prepare for the ultimate try out of life.

Review

This is a great book!  It is about one man’s past, one boy’s dreams and a mother’s hope.  But along with those are lessons to be learned by the characters and the reader alike.  For Ricky, if you want something bad enough work for it and don’t let anyone stand in your way.  For Maria, don’t be too proud to accept help.  For the Pitcher, life could be a lot worse and don’t hide yourself away from the world.

These three main characters have a lot to learn from life and becoming involved with each other enables the characters to learn and grow and become better people.  There were times when each of the characters gave up, but another came along to push them so that they would see their value and worth.  I thought this book was motivating and is definitely worth reading!  Sometimes I thought that the story was set in the past, but it is set in modern times as evidenced by music, television and politics.

This book is a Junior Library Guild Selection for Fall and well deserving of that selection.  I think everyone could learn something from this book and that isn’t something I say all the time.  We give this book 4 1/2 paws

Author William Hazelgrove

William Hazelgrove is the best selling author of five novels, Ripples, Tobacco Sticks Mica Highways and Rocket Man and The Pitcher His books have received starred reviews in Publisher Weekly, Book of the Month Selections, Junior Library Guild Selections, ALA Editors Choice Awards and optioned for the movies. He was the Ernest Hemingway Writer in Residence where he wrote in the attic of Ernest Hemingway’s birthplace. He has written articles and reviews for USA Today and other publications. His latest novel Rocket Man due out May 1, 2013 was chosen Book of the Year by Books and Authors.net. He runs a political cultural blog, The View From Hemingway’s Attic. A forthcoming novel, The Pitcher will be out Sept 1, 2013. He lives in Chicago.

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Ends 10/27/11

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