String and thoughtful storytelling from Heather Murphy Capps. I appreciate what this author brings to youth lit space and would gladly add this book to my classroom or school library.

Insanely creative take on a timeless tale of feeling like an outcast for reasons outside your control. Deals with sensitive topics in an age appropriate but no less powerful way. Will encourage kids to approach race, class, difference in general through a new lens.

I will be encouraging the educators I work with to order this book for their classrooms.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with this book for free in exchange for my review! All opinions are my own.

I might be a 25 year old woman, but I absolutely love baseball! It's just a super fun and invigorating game -- especially when you see it live! This was a delightful children's book about baseball - perfect for both young boys and girls! Loved this one.

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Many Thanks again to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with this book in exchange for my honest review.

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I loved this book. I grabbed it because it's a middle grade book with baseball on the cover and I fell in love because of the depth of human emotion, the upheaval of social life among middle schoolers, the exploration of generational trauma, the beautiful, normalizing representation of therapy, and a history lesson about something I never knew happened (that happened during my lifetime...).
Great work!

“You have it within you to take control of a situation instead of letting it take control of you. Instead of letting anger speak for you, you speak for yourself.”

“We could break the cycle. We could be more than our trauma….I was done being held hostage by smoke. Be the bat, not the ball.”

WOW—this book covers so much ground with such care. It’s really powerful how it shows these racist line-crossing, not-ok incidents kids like Wyatt experience but how messy they are to actually do something about sometimes. I felt his stress so viscerally. I love the use of magical realism, magical embodiment of trauma, and having to hide that. So relatable, so inventive. I love the model of family therapy, and the way the story through Wyatt, Dominic and even Asher ask what we inherit from family—and even more so, what we’re going to do with our inheritance. I felt he was a bit too harsh on Dallas and maybe didn’t have fair expectations on her to always agree with him, but appreciated how he acknowledged his own imperfections by the end of the book. I had never heard about MOVE or the bombing (which is wild, btw) and got messy feelings about their approach, but appreciate the complexity to which Capps captures this movement, and ultimately lifts up their humanness and the injustice in the extreme way they were treated by police.

An incredible, haunting book that will stick with me for a long time.