Children & YA

“John Carter Cash flies readers to magical castles by the sea as one little girl shares an adventure with her daddy by her side. The special bond between father and daughter protect them from pirates and alligators and guide them on the backs of eagles on which they return to their own home where Daddy tucks his little girl safely in her bed. Daddy reminds his little girl that however far they might roam and however high they fly, his love for his little girl will always keep them safe and strong.”

Gratz builds this novel upon a clever enough conceit—nine stories (or innings), each following the successive generations in a single family, linked by baseball and Brooklyn—and executes it with polish and precision. In the opening stories, there is something Scorsese-like (albeit with the focus on players, not gangsters) in Gratz’s treatment of early New York: a fleet-footed German immigrant helps Alexander Cartwright (credited with creating modern baseball) during a massive 1845 factory fire; a young boy meets his hero, the great King Kelly, who by age thirty is a washed-up alcoholic scraping by as a vaudeville act. … [T]aken together they present a sweeping diaspora of Americana, tracking the changes in a family through the generations, in society at large for more than a century and a half, and, not least, in that quintessential American pastime.”