March Book Club: A Crooked Kind of Perfect

Our March meeting of the Ashburn Kids Book Club will feature the book, "A Crooked Kind of Perfect" by Linda Urban. This book is one of the nominees for this year's Virginia Readers Choice award. This book features 11-year-old Zoe as the main character. Zoe dreams of playing the piano and one day performing in Carnegie Hall. But her eccentric father gets talked into buying an organ instead of a piano and Zoe must adjust her dream to fit reality. Her organ teacher, Maybelline Person, recognizes that Zoe has natural talent and nudges her to enter an organ competition. Zoe accepts the challenge but must also cope with her loving but agoraphobic father, a lonely classmate who starts to hang out at Zoe's house, and her workaholic mother. Zoe and the other characters are full of quirky wisdom and irrepressible good humor. The family's life is a bit unconventional but works well and Zoe knows she is loved and supported. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and found myself laughing out loud at times. This is an impressive debut novel for author Linda Urban. Hopefully there will be more books by her soon. See you all on March 7, 7 pm, for our next Ashburn Kids Book Club meeting.

February Book Club: Jackie Robinson

February is traditionally the month when school children study about Black History. I thought it would work well to do two books about Jackie Robinson this month. The first book is titled, "Dad, Jackie, and Me" and was written by author Myron Uhlberg. This is a picture book and is one of the nominees for this year's Virginia Readers Choice book award. The book details the story of a young boy and his deaf father and their shared enthusiasm for the Brooklyn Dodgers during the 1947 season when Jackie Robinson became the first African-American baseball player in the major leagues. It is also about discrimination and tolerance--both from the standpoint of Jackie Robinson and the deaf father. The beautiful illustrations by artist Colin Bootman are a perfect match for Uhlberg's poignant text.

The second book we are reading for Febrary has an almost identical title: "Jackie and Me." It is written by Dan Gutman and is one of the books in his well-known Baseball Card Adventure series. The premise of these books is that the main character, 13-year-old Joe Stoshack, has the ability to travel back in time by using baseball cards. In this book, Joe travels back to the 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers season in order to experience first-hand what it was like for Jackie Robinson. Not only does he travel back in time, he actually stays with the Robinson's at their apartment and becomes a bat boy for the team. He is also transformed into an African-American and gets to experience for himself what discrimination was like back in the 1940s. The author has done an excellent job of researching the details of Jackie Robinson's life and career and using those details to create an exciting and suspenseful book.

For our activity this month we will be watching several film clips about Jackie Robinson from Ken Burns' documentary, Baseball. See you on Thursday, February 4, at 7 pm.