Battle of the Books 2025 Reviews: Fast Pitch and How Do You Spell Unfair?

My youngest is engaged in the Battle of the Books, a competition sponsored by our local public library. His team of classmates are reading nine books and getting ready to answer trivia questions at a county-wide meeting in late April. I am reading some of the books too. The first two I read have reviews here. Now for another two...

Fast Pitch by Nic Stone

Shenice "Lightning" Lockwood is a catcher on an all-black female fast-pitch softball team in the U12 level of the Dixie Youth Softball Association. They are the first all-Black team to make it to the playoffs. Lightning is the team captain and carries a family tradition of "batball," as her younger brother calls it. Her father, grandfather, and great-grandfather all played in their time. Complications arise when she finds out about her grandfather, JonJon Lockwood. He played in the Negro League and had ambitions to go MLB...ambitions that never played out. She doesn't know the story of why he stopped playing ball. Her dying great-uncle tells her that the career-ending moment was a crime that JonJon did not actually commit. Great-uncle has some evidence and wants Shenice to clear his brother's name. So she's got a lot on her plate aside from being a twelve-year old on a championship-bound team.

The book does a good job blending the soft-ball drama with the more dominant personal-history drama (and lots of comedic touches to keep things a little lighter). She has to navigate her family, which doesn't know about the scandal (it got swept under the rug). She discovers a lot of discrimination that her family experienced, especially living in the American South. She still experiences some discrimination but clearly not as much as her forefathers. One or two hard-to-believe plot contrivances make the book at bit longer than it needs to be. Otherwise this is an entertaining middle-school read.

Recommended.

How Do You Spell Unfair? MacNolia Cox and the National Spelling Bee written by Carole Boston Weatherford and Illustrated by Frank Morrison

MacNolia Cox was one of two African-American girls to compete in the 1936 Scripps National Spelling Bee, the first time since 1908 that a black child participated in an American national spelling bee. She came from Akron, Ohio, where locals were proud to send her off to the Washington, D.C. championship. Her trip was not the best experience as she encountered segregation (she had to switch to the "blacks only" train car once they crossed into Maryland; she and her escorts had to stay at a different hotel from the white contestants in D.C.). MacNolia made it to the top five spellers (the other African-American girl went out in tenth place). She failed on the word "nemesis," which she had not studied because it was not on the official list. Her teacher and the Akron journalist who accompanied her protested to no avail. Even so, coming in fifth in a nation-wide pool was a proud accomplishment, recognized on her return to Akron in 1936 and by the U. S. Senate in 2021.

The story is both inspiring and heartbreaking. The main downside is that the reader does not get to know MacNolia as a person--did she have a sense of humor or a sense of style? What did she think of school, of spelling, of her fellow spellers, of her teacher? She isn't so much a distinct person but a character in the history of American Civil Rights. I wanted a little bit more about her. The art is great, with splash pages depicting the scenes in a charming style.

Recommended.