Dear Authors:

I do not like baseball.

Please stop writing good baseball books. I do not want to like baseball.

Love, Me

As you may have suspected, THE BROOKLYN NINE is both A. about baseball and B. really good. I’d blame it on the awesomely cool concept, but no, Alan Gratz is a good writer too (darn him) and made the baseball parts entertaining (much more entertaining than watching a game is) and I couldn’t put it down.

(Darn you, Alan Gratz. AND darn you Kurtis Scaletta, whose excellent baseball book MUDVILLE will probably be the subject of my next review.)

As a former children’s bookseller I can tell you there is always room on the shelf for another excellent sports novel. Just like kids who read fantasy don’t read much else, kids who read sports novels always want another sports novel. So you’ve got Dan Gutman for the younger kids, and Mike Lupica for the middle grade kids (and John H. Ritter), and Rich Wallace writes for both elementary and YA. And there’s a few others in there with a novel here or there, but basically that’s it. Publishers: we need more sports books. So my former bookstore is going to love you, Alan Gratz. They sell your mysteries just fine but they’re going to sell the crap out of your baseball book.

(I suppose I should get to what the book is about?)

THE BROOKLYN NINE has the subtitle A NOVEL IN NINE INNINGS. We begin in inning 1 with Felix, a young German immigrant, who thinks he’s the fastest boy in Manhattan. He wears special shoes that his cobbler father made him before he traveled to NY to live with family, and they’re all that he has to remind him of home. He’s so fast that he can take breaks from his messenger/delivery job to watch the New York Knickerbockers play an early version of baseball called Three-Out, All Out. He dreams of one day playing for the team.

A lot of the Knickerbockers are volunteer firefighters, and one day when a massive fire breaks out in lower Manhattan while Felix is watching a game, he ends up going along with the team while they go to fight the fire. His feet are injured in the fire and he loses his delivery job. His uncle has to use the money Felix was saving to bring his family over from Germany to pay the medical bills. Because the fire burned down so many businesses, his uncle has lost his job and the family must move into a tenement and sew suits for a living.

Felix can no longer run and his dreams of baseball are fading. But with the near-ruined leather from the shoes his father made him he sews a baseball, and vows that baseball will be a part of his life somehow.

And then we start to trace the baseball, and Felix’s baseball-obsessed family, through history. Each inning is about a separate person (and two of them are girls – thank you, Alan) and each one is better than the last. History and baseball and family and racial prejudice and immigration and con artists and the Dodgers leaving Brooklyn – this book’s got a little of everything.

I (begrudgingly admit that I) loved it.

Publisher: Penguin

Pub Date: March 2009