BAT 6

Bat 6 explores values in post-WWII America. The full-cast performance makes this powerful story an exceptional audiobook. Each character tells the same story from her own perspective; each has a distinct voice; each captures the pride, excitement, confusion and pain she feels at different times throughout the story. We hear the anger in Shazam building to an explosion; we sympathize with Aki as she debates honesty versus cultural expectation; and we sense what is coming as each reader records her part in the story. This is a great book to start discussions of prejudice and responsibility with upper-elementary and middle-school students. W.L.S. Winner of AUDIOFILE Earphones Award. (c) AudioFile 2000, Portland, Maine

May 4, 1998
Wolff's (Make Lemonade) ambitious but ultimately unsuccessful novel explores prejudice via a baseball game between the sixth grade girls of Bear Creek Ridge and Barlow Road Grade Schools on May 28, 1949. "Now that it's over, we are telling. We voted to, it's fairer than not," begins Tootie, the catcher for Bear Creek Ridge, in what appears to be the start of a series of flashback testimonials. But not all of the 21 girls' accounts adhere to this format, and readers never discover whom the girls are addressing. Some of the characters speak only a few times, and since readers never get to know them, their voices run together in a miscellany. The actual conflict--when Shazam, whose father died at Pearl Harbor, in a run to first base, assaults Aki, the Japanese first baseman--occurs more than halfway through the book. The most distinct voices belong to Shazam (who speaks in a stream-of-consciousness style, "Sneaky Japs never warned nobody they snuck behind our backs dropped bombs right in my fathers ship the Arizona he was down in it without no warning") and to Aki, whose perspective is markedly different from the other girls'. Shazam exposes much of her troubled background through her narratives, and Aki reveals some fascinating cultural details as well as provides insight into life in an internment camp. However, because readers are only acquainted with the two through a few lengthy accounts interspersed among the other 19 girls, the change in both of them (especially in Shazam) at story's end seems sudden and hollow. While readers cannot help but admire the stalwart Aki, they will likely walk away from this book trying to make sense of who these characters were and what they were trying to say. Ages 10-13.