Sophomore Campaign

Gr 9 Up—This novel set in 1949 Milwaukee continues the story of an autistic youth with phenomenal baseball skills. Having escaped the clutches of his evil father in The Legend of Mickey Tussler (St. Martin's, 2009), Mickey has come under the protection of his manager, Arthur Murphy, who has fallen in love with Mickey's mother. Arthur woos and marries her, and the newly formed family lives together in relative happiness, although Mickey's condition continues to draw the taunts of opposing players and fans. Murph's job security is also an issue due to the unexplained animosity of the team owner, the nefarious Warren Dennison. Further complications arise when, at Murph's insistence, the team signs a Negro League star, Lester Sledge. Opposition to Lester's presence culminates in an attempted lynching by the local branch of the KKK. Several of Lester's teammates arrive on the scene at the last minute to rescue him, even as another teammate is unmasked as one of the miscreants. The complicity of a corrupt sheriff is documented on a recording device he had been given as a present, but Murph agrees to a deal in which the sheriff will admit guilt and testify as to the involvement of an opposing manager-but only if Murph's team wins the championship game. If they lose, he will surrender the tape to the sheriff. (No, it makes no sense at all.) The outlandish and difficult-to-follow plot is at times rendered almost incomprehensible by tortured syntax and grandiloquent prose. It is difficult to imagine any reader getting past the first few pages of this earnest but regrettable effort.—Richard Luzer, Fair Haven Union High School, VT