Friends with Books discussion

Any YA Sports recommendations?


There are two YA sports that stand out to me. Dairy Queen and Mexican Whiteboy. In Dairy Queen D.J. is this tough female main character with an ever day life. She starts to want to change her life because she doesn't want to be a cow :P It's a football book. I can relate to Danny from Mexican Whiteboy because he's hispanic but he can't speak spanish so he is an outsider in hos home family and where he grows up. It's a baseball book.

The Batboy by Mike Lupica and The Girl Who Threw Butterflies by Mick Cochrane were both very good, especially the latter. I'm interested in reading more by Mike Lupica in the near future.

Never heard of these. Lupica is pretty famous for his sports books but I can't say I've ever read them but it's about time. Sports in YA are becoming a fast favorite genre of mine.

The qualifications for a book as actually being a "sports book" can be kind of ambiguous. If Crash by Jerry Spinelli qualifies, then I'd say that it's the best example of the genre that I've ever read. It may even be the best book by Jerry Spinelli that I've ever read, and that's saying a lot!

I'm also interested in reading Lou Gehrig: Iron Horse of Baseball. I love Lou Gehrig's story, and I'm sure that James Buckley, Jr., a very well-respected baseball researcher whose books I've come across in the past, is capable of relating Lou Gehrig's emotional and inspiring odyssey in a meaningful way to his middle-grade readers.

It says sports on the side where people put it in their shelves so it's good. You are saying the BEST? That's a challenge if I've heard one so now I must read that book. Going to go look for it in the library...added it!

If it does qualify as a sports book, then it's definitely the best of the genre that I've ever read. In fact, Crash makes it onto my list of the best twenty-five books of any kind that I've ever read. I'm not sure if it's the best Jerry Spinelli book that I've ever read, though. Maniac Magee, Stargirl, Love, Stargirl andWringer are also right up there with it.

Yeah, but I don't like Stargirl... it's probably because I had to read it in spanish and then read it in english at the same time because I read horrible in spanish but yeah...

I was doing this thing on my blog where it was a challenge and I was thinking over which is my favorite: Maniac Magee or Wringer. I reread them the same number of times but I ended up going with Wringer. I don't know why I like it over Maniac Magee. There both masterpieces to me anyways.

One book that most wouldn't immediately think of for the "Sports" category, but which fits just about as well as Jerry Spinelli's Crash, is Heroes by Robert Cormier. The table tennis scenes in this book are some of the most skillfully drawn, evocatively described sports writing that I have read in any young-adult or middle-grade novel. It just goes to show, once again, how incredibly versatile Robert Cormier was as a writer.

What!!!??? He's done a book on table tennis! He's so diverse in his books. I need to get more of his books.

Adriana wrote: "What!!!??? He's done a book on table tennis! He's so diverse in his books. I need to get more of his books."

Well, it's not necessarily about table tennis. There's so much table tennis action in the book, though, that it undeniably affects (in a positive way) the readability of the story as a whole. Just as Robert Cormier proves his aptitude for creating compelling verse in Frenchtown Summer, so he also shows how good he is at presenting sublime sports scenes in Heroes. I don't think there's any facet of writing in which he couldn't perform!

Oh okay. I always thought his book were just thriller and filled with twists.

There's definitely plenty of that in Heroes. In addition to being one of the last books that he ever wrote, I think of it also as being one of his very best.