Rabbit Day Book Review - March

I picked up an interesting book this month by chance for Lance at the library; King of Mound: My Summer with Satchel Paige by Wes Tooke.  I usually avoid sports books because too many are written in a manner closer to twaddle than literature, but since it was baseball I decided to give it a chance.  Its a historical fiction biography, and though the boy in the story is fiction, the author upholds that all the facts about the famous pitcher, Satchel Paige, are accurate.  Satchel is quite the character, in every sense of the word.  The story takes place about mid-career and deals with some of the racial prejudices of the time (1920-1930ish) but as a side story, not the main story.  The story is about Satchel's incredible gift for pitching and a young boy struck with polio trying to find a way to play baseball again.  The only caution I have for the book is that the father of the boy views his son as damaged goods, "a cripple", at the beginning of the book because he is lame from polio and can not play baseball anymore.  The father eventually comes around but it leaves the reader wondering if he would have had the boy not found a way to use his leg again.

This month Jared read On the Far Side of the Mountain by Jeane Craighead George.  I had picked this book up at the Library Used curriculum sale in December.  It is the sequel to My Side of the Mountain that Jared had so enjoyed reading as a group at SEEK in the fall.  Jared enjoyed this book equally well.  There was a bit more suspense in this book than the first.  The first book focused living on the land, this one a bit more on skills needed to explore the land.  It's always nice to find a sequel that is equal to the first book in the series.

We found the gem of all gems in our Historical Read Aloud this month: My Escape from the Auto de Fe by Don Fernando de la Mina.  Don't let the cheap cover turn you off, this is a book that should be on every home's book shelf.  It is the actual memoirs passed down through the generations of a man who actually escaped being burned as a heretic in the Spanish Inquisition (1559) and went on to experience the Bartholemew Day Massacre (1572) in person as well.  The preface states that the book is as true a direct translation as possible of a letter written from father to son detailing his escape.  This book is so exciting, I can't believe no one has ever taken it and made a great adventure movie.  As we read, we kept thinking, how can this all be true.

Originally I had intended to read Good Queen Bess by Alda Sims Malkus, for historical fiction before finding Auto de Fe.  This is a fine book about Queen Elizabeth but for my boys it would have found it a bit too placid as a read aloud.  However, I still wanted to expand on what they had learned about the famous queen so we read Good Queen Bess by Diane Stanley instead.  This is a 30 page beautifully illustrated book we read in two sittings.  It provided the general covering I was hoping for about the period, a quality I generally expect from Stanley's books (only exception is her terrible book about Saladin).