Book Twelve: The Bat Boy and His Violin

The Bat Boy and His Violin
By Gavin Curtis and Illustrations by E.B. Lewis
Publisher: Scholastic, New York (1998)

Readability Lexile: 700L

This story is about the son of a Negro Baseball League Manager named Reginald, and he prefers to play the violin instead of play baseball. His fathers team the Dukes are not very good, and he decides to make his violin playing son the bat boy. The first game the team is losing until Reginald starts to play the violin. All of a sudden the team starts a long winning streak. It is a story about a father loving his son for who he is, and accepts the fact that he will not be just like him.

I loved this book! I thought everything from the text to the illustrations were outstanding. The plot was really well thought of for this historical fiction story. You really start to get to know all the characters (not just the main one). They fit very well in this time period because it was right after Jackie Robinson switched baseball leagues. I think on of my favorite parts of the book was how the characters were portrayed. I felt that they were very realistically represented, and they were not stereotyped in anyway. It would be very easy to make this book stereotypical, but the author and illustrator do a fabulous job of representing that culture well.This story really shows that a parent will love you for who you are. You really start to see the growth in the father throughout the book, and he starts to accept his sons gift more and more.  This book is for upper elementary because of the language and themes. You would have to pre-teach some of the vocabulary, but it would be worth it. Some of the themes are accepting people for who they are, civil rights era, power of music, etc..

I would use this book when talking about accepting people for who they are and the gifts they have. I think this would be a great alley way to talking about accepting people (which is not always an easy thing to talk about). It is an important thing to talk about especially in elementary because not everyone is going to be a great athlete or singer, but we need to have those talks about people being individuals and accepting everyone for who they are.



Thanks for reading!

Gorms