Chet The Dog

Posts Tagged ‘Bullet Point’

October and Baseball

This is the best month for baseball lovers! Football, basketball, hockey – they’d all be basically understandable right away to a newcomer seeing a game for the first time, but baseball: never! Baseball comes up quite a bit in our work – in the YA thriller Bullet Point, for example, the kids’ picture book Quacky Baseball, and of course The Fan was all about baseball. (Cal Ripken, Jr., paying me a very nice compliment on its accuracy, asked how far I’d gone in baseball.  That was a funny conversation.) Baseball also comes up in the Chet and Bernie series. Here’s a little something from Thereby Hangs A Tail:

We drove toward the sun, through a few neighborhoods a lot like our own, then past a baseball field with a kids’ game going on. I didn’t understand baseball but it always looked like fun, and the ball itself I loved. Who’d have guessed what the insides were like? At that very moment a kid swung his bat and the ball went soaring into the sky. We weren’t going very fast. Would it be totally impossible to –

 

Beginnings (More – Revised)

On Sundays we’ve been doing beginnings – all the Peter Abrahams books in chronological order, including those written under the Spencer Quinn pen name. A while back we did this one, but forgot to mention that it was our little Hamlet. Wyatt, the main character, is taking Hamlet in English in high school. Hamlet has a hard time with the question of whether he should believe the ghost of his father; Wyatt has parallel questions about his own father. The answer comes dramatically in both stories. (But of course we always try not to push this kind of thing too far – trust the reader!) Here from 2010 – #23, BULLET POINT, a YA novel with hardboiled – and Elizabethan – roots.

[“Gutsier and sexier than most YA novels dare, Abrahams’s thriller wrenches guts with a Richard Price-like facility. Readers will be as irretrievably drawn in as Wyatt.”
– Daniel Kraus, Booklist Starred Review]

Times were bad. Baker Brothers Iron and Metal Foundry went bankrupt. They fired everybody, including Rusty Halenka, who’d worked the seven-to-five on the main furnace for fourteen years. That meant he was around the house a lot. Rusty was Wyatt Lathem’s stepdad. They hadn’t gotten along when times were good.

Beginnings (More)

On Sundays we’ve been doing beginnings – all the Peter Abrahams books in chronological order, including those written under the Spencer Quinn pen name. Here from 2010 – #23, BULLET POINT, a YA novel with hardboiled roots.

[“Gutsier and sexier than most YA novels dare, Abrahams’s thriller wrenches guts with a Richard Price-like facility. Readers will be as irretrievably drawn in as Wyatt.”
– Daniel Kraus, Booklist Starred Review]

Times were bad. Baker Brothers Iron and Metal Foundry went bankrupt. They fired everybody, including Rusty Halenka, who’d worked the seven-to-five on the main furnace for fourteen years. That meant he was around the house a lot. Rusty was Wyatt Lathem’s stepdad. They hadn’t gotten along when times were good.

What Makes It All Worthwhile