 |
| From Amazon. Dot Com. |
Piggybacking
on my last post, which was about The
Angel Park All-Stars, one of the few young adult series aimed at boys…
There was one author who consistently wrote for boys, and if you are a guy, you
probably know his name – Matt
Christopher.
If
you can think of a sport, Matt Christopher wrote a book about an earnest youngster
overcoming his struggles in it and eventually succeeding. Off the top of my
head, I can think of hoops, baseball and soccer books with these themes, but
Wikipedia tells me that he also wrote books about golf, volleyball, snowboarding
and dirt bike racing. (Really???)
I
remember him most for his seminal work, The Kid Who
Only Hit Homers. The book came out in 1972 – yikes – but I probably
read it when I was in first or second grade, around 1990. The work is exactly
what it says on the tin. A kid sucks at baseball, but after speaking with a
Mysterious Stranger, he only hits home runs until the final game of the season.
Surprisingly,
I don’t think any of his books were optioned into movies. Maybe he just had no
interest in that, but pretty much all of them could have been done seamlessly in
the Mighty Ducks / generic Disney
sports movie mold. He died in 1997, so I’m presuming that he had interest from
studios at some point.
Anyway,
if you’re a parent of a young child and reading this, first, please stop. It’s
probably bad for you to be reading anything I write. But secondly, go get your
kid some Matt Christopher books. They’re easily digestible for the kid mind.
