So,
way back in July 2010, I wrote about a series of books aimed at adolescent
young boys: The
Angel Park All-Stars.
In
case you don’t feel like clicking that handy link, the 14-book series is about
a Little League team from California that (spoiler about a 20-year-old book
series) wins a couple of regional titles. It stuck in my mind as one of the few
series aimed at young boys that wasn’t fantasy-based, like the works of Lloyd
Alexander.
However,
at the time I lamented that I had only gotten to read about half the series, because
there were 14 books to track down and read. Fast forward to about a year later.
Out
of the blue, I got a nice e-mail from a lady in Oregon. She said she bought the
entire series at a yard sale, and while her sons hadn’t liked it so much – to be
expected, since it’s somewhat dated now – she was willing to ship them out to
me for about $20.
I
jumped at the chance, and finally got to read up on the rest of the series. I’m
not going to lie – It felt very odd to be finishing them up as a 27-year-old
man, just reading them in my apartment. Each book is about 75 pages, max, with
big font, so a single book took about 30 minutes.
However,
they didn’t disappoint, and I’ve kept all of them. Ideally, I’d like to keep
them until I have kids of my own someday. (Side note: I put the ETA on that
sometime in the 2020s. I’m pacing myself.)
I was in the target age demographic for these in the early 1990s, so I can remember them all too vividly. Clearly they paled in comparison to some of the best Matt Christopher ones, but they also built up interesting relationships between the characters that were more long standing. And, of course, inevitably branched out into other sports as well.
ReplyDeleteOdd that you mentioned Matt Christopher, since my latest post was about him! Yeah, he also wrote books for young boys, although his works were aimed at a slightly older age group in mind. However, except for the Kid Who Only Hit HRs series, he didn't really return to the same characters that often.
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