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Soup #11

Soup's Hoop

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Swish! Soup and Rob have basketball fever. The entire town of Learning, Vermont, is psyched up for the big game against their archrival, Pratt Falls. But there's trouble. The Learning Groundhogs' star center, Shorty Smith, has sprained his ankle.



Soup and Rob have a plan. Their new friend Piffle Shootensinker, a seven-foot-tall European basketball star from Pretzelstein, has just moved to town. Piff has a problem. He's homesick, he misses his dog, and can sink a basket only when he hears the music of his homeland on the spitzentootle. What's a spinzentootle? It doesn't take Rob and Soup long to learn. Can they locate one (and also find a dog) in time to inspire Piff to lead the Learning Groundhogs to victory?

144 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

42 people want to read

About the author

Robert Newton Peck

87 books82 followers
Robert Newton Peck is an American author of books for young adults. His titles include Soup and A Day No Pigs Would Die. He claims to have been born on February 17, 1928, in Vermont, but has refused to specify where. Similarly, he claims to have graduated from a high school in Texas, which he has also refused to identify. Some sources state that he was born in Nashville, Tennessee (supposedly where his mother was born, though other sources indicate she was born in Ticonderoga, New York, and that Peck, himself, may have been born there). The only reasonably certain Vermont connection is that his father was born in Cornwall.

Peck has written over sixty books including a great book explaining his childhood to becoming a teenager working on the farm called: A Day no Pigs would Die

He was a smart student, although his schooling was cut short by World War II. During and shortly after the conflict, he served as a machine-gunner in the U.S. Army 88th Infantry Division. Upon returning to the United States, he entered Rollins College, graduating in 1953. He then entered Cornell Law School, but never finished his course of study.

Newton married Dorothy Anne Houston and fathered two children, Anne and Christopher. The best man at the wedding and the godfather to the children was Fred Rogers of Mr. Roger's Neighborhood fame.

A Day No Pigs Would Die was his first novel, published in 1972 when he was already 44 years old. From then on he continued his lifelong journey through literature. To date, he has been credited for writing 55 fiction books, 6 nonfiction books, 35 songs, 3 television specials and over a hundred poems.

Several of his historical novels are about Fort Ticonderoga: Fawn, Hang for Treason, The King's Iron.

In 1993, Peck was diagnosed with oral cancer, but survived. As of 2005, he was living in Longwood, Florida, where he has in the past served as the director of the Rollins College Writers Conference. Peck sings in a barbershop quartet, plays ragtime piano, and is an enthusiastic speaker. His hobby is visiting schools, "to turn kids on to books."

From Wikipedia

For more information, please see http://www.answers.com/topic/robert-n...

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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
Profile Image for Dan.
87 reviews
July 11, 2015
The early books of the Soup series are so dramatically different than those towards the end that it's hard to judge the later books fairly. In the early books the stories are believable, and have the charm of feeling like the kinds of things that happened to us all as kids. This and others towards the end give up the realism for silliness. We have the country of Pretzelstein, for example, a country where citizens are able to play amazing basketball anytime their made-up instrument is playing.

Again - this isn't bad in itself, but it's such a shift from the early books that it's strange to think they're in the same series. I miss the early vignettes with Rob looking for his football valve, or accidentally breaking a window by throwing an apple. Mostly, though, I miss Rob actually having a personality and not just blindly following Soup everywhere and wondering "what will he think of next?"
Profile Image for Sarah.
1,700 reviews63 followers
May 10, 2008
Gosh, but I'm influence by what I read! I think this book provoked me to join our school's basketball team (the results were less than stellar to say the least. I'm a veritable klutz and I DON'T like balls whizzing toward my head.)
2,580 reviews4 followers
April 25, 2018
B. fiction, children's fiction, 20th c., pranks, humor, series, (Soup, #11). Mom's stash, keep
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews

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