Review by Booklist Review
K-Gr. 3. The author of You Forgot Your Skirt, Amelia Bloomer (2000) is back, and using the movie A League of Their Own as inspiration, has penned an exuberant tribute to the real-life All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. She opens with all the words to Take Me Out to the Ball Game, including the opening lines that show the 1908 song is in a female voice. Setting the story during World War II, Corey introduces baseball-mad Katie Casey. Katie doesn't dance well, or cook well, or knit, but she sure can play baseball, although she isn't allowed to try out for the school team. Then, with all the boys going off to war, Phillip Wrigley, owner of the Chicago Cubs, holds tryouts for girls' teams, and hundreds show up, including Katie. The Rockford Peaches (and three other teams) are born and play worthy baseball. Kids, both girls and boys, will revel in the energy and joy Corey packs into her story. Gibbon's pictures look straight out of the 1940s, with vintage details and an evocative color palette. They also possess a winsome charm that plays nicely with the text. Corey's sly repetition of the phrase What good is baseball to a girl? will have modern-day sluggers longing for a turn at bat. --GraceAnne DeCandido Copyright 2003 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Most folks can sing the refrain to "Take Me Out to the Ball Game," but fewer know the verses about a "baseball mad" girl named Katie Casey. In this sprightly story of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League of the 1940s, Corey (You Forgot Your Skirt, Amelia Bloomer!) gives the fictional Katie a mitt and a powerful swing. Katie, with arms akimbo and a mischievous grin, "wasn't good at being a girl at least not the kind of girl everyone thought she should be." The tomboy "prefer[s] sliding to sewing, batting to baking, and home runs to homecoming." She seems not to notice her home-ec teacher's anxiety or her parents' frowns at her unladylike interest. When professional men's baseball goes into decline during WWII, Katie travels to Chicago's Wrigley Field to try out for a nascent women's league; she's recruited to the Kenosha (Wis.) Comets. With a shrewd eye to '40s fashion and wavy hairdos, Gibbon (Poetry at Play: Outside the Lines) pictures the team playing in tan dresses, blue knee socks and caps, while Katie's once-disapproving parents smile in the stands. The sunny watercolor and colored-pencil illustrations situate one girl's experience within wider American history; on one spread, a casual portrait of FDR appears while, opposite, a draft notice lies in an abandoned ball field. Corey blends lively fiction and fact, and includes an enthusiastic afterword about her research into the AAGPBL (David A. Adler's Mama Played Baseball, illus. by Chris O'Leary, [reviewed Feb. 3] also explores the subject). Corey's latest title makes an impressive addition to her growing backlist of historical, feminist-themed picture books. Ages 5-8. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by School Library Journal Review
Gr 1-3-Alta Weiss "must have been born to play baseball," and as the first woman to join a men's semipro team in 1907, she did just that. This first-person fictionalized account is a powerful testament to her talent and determination. Spirited acrylic illustrations are equally noteworthy. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Horn Book Review
Corey focuses on a fictional girl--nontraditional, ball-playing Katie Casey--to tell the story of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, founded when WWII interrupted America's favorite pastime. The writing is spirited, the story is satisfying, and the illustrations--just old-fashioned enough to indicate the time period--are lively. However, the story seems driven by its (extensive) author's note, rather than the other way around. From HORN BOOK Fall 2003, (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
This upbeat but uneven book draws from the history of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League and the famous song "Take Me Out to the Ball Game." Carey (Milly and the Macy's Parade, 2002, etc.) takes Katie Casey, who in the famous song "was baseball mad," and imagines that she was recruited for the women's league, founded in 1943 when many professional male players joined the military. A scout recruits Katie, who is inept at stereotypical female pastimes like cooking but great at baseball, for the Kenosha Comets. On opening day, she hits a grand-slam to win the game. The inclusion of "Take Me Out to the Ball Game," a song about a girl on a date rooting for "the boys," and the title word "pigtails," a term more associated with young children than professional athletes, both seem at odds with the book's role described in the author's note as a "tribute" to the "women" of the AAGPBL. But even more jarring is the style of illustration, which portrays all the players as slim and perky, unlike many of the real, often muscular, players. Accuracy is further undermined by the picture of a dark-skinned player being scouted, giving the impression that the AAGPBL had African-American players, which it did not. A more accurate and engaging picture book on the same subject is Dirt on Their Skirts: The Story of the Young Women Who Won the World Championship (2000), by Doreen Rappaport and Lyndall Callan, with illustrations by E.B. Lewis, that shows sturdy players and include photographs of them on the endpapers. (Picture book. 5-9) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
