Striking Out

Striking Out
By Will Weaver
HarperCollins Publishers
New York, New York
0-06-023346-X
1993

Summary

It is 1970 and Billy Boggs is thirteen years old and lives underneath the shadow of his late brother Robert who had died five years earlier in a farming accident. The accident wasn’t quite Billy’s fault, but the sudden death has left the family fragmented in several ways. The town they live near, and where Billy goes to school, might as well exist on another planet. Billy lives on a struggling farm and since Robert died, most of the chores fall on Billy’s shoulders. There is barely anytime for fun, but in rare spare moments, Billy works on his pitching. One Saturday while in town at the Feed Store and watching the boys from town play ball, Billy’s strong pitching and throwing arm is revealed when he returns a home run ball from across the street all the way to the catchers mitt. That one small, seemingly insignificant act starts a chain of events that marks the struggle of Billy to come out from under the shadow of Robert and become his own person. Helping him out on his journey is his mother who is also “striking out” on her own as a secretary at a doctors office. Billy, his mother, and his father deal with the new starts in their own ways and at times the tension is strong. But all three are stubborn and forge their own paths.

Billy has never had friends before. The farm was far from town and farm life didn’t make for a great social life anyways. Gina and Heather, two young girls who pretty much live on their own on land near the farm, are close to friends as Billy had. But Gina was a pest, and Heather, who was older, was a pretty girl outside of Billy’s league. The girls were fine living by themselves and their own rules until Heather gets involved with an older man. Billy tries to help the best he can, but once again, adults run Billy’s life.

Impressions

Striking Out is a story many teens would identify with on the level that Billy’s father’s expectations of Billy were beyond Billy’s wants and needs. Most will not understand life on the farm, but they will understand a father who tries to push an iron will on his young teenage son. Billy can be hard to like at times because he can be as surly as his father. At the same time one can understand why Billy doesn’t want to be a charity case.

Girls who pick up this book will appreciate the storyline of Billy’s mother, although I don’t see many girls wanting to read the book if they only look at the cover art and the liner notes. However, I believe this book was not written to necessarily appeal to the female reader, and that is not a bad thing. As a female who is a big baseball fan, I had to struggle with getting into the book. The Father is a surly figure and Billy isn’t likable. I wanted to feel sorry for him because it is obvious he misses his brother, but I had a hard time with feeling sorry for Billy. The male readers will identify that Billy’s surliness is just male pride and is his ay of expressing emotion. As a female, I was frustrated that Billy didn’t yell at his father and tell him how he was feeling, and what a big jerk his father was. It was Billy’s mother who did the yelling and adequately expressed Billy’s thoughts. Figures.

Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
In this story of a 13-year-old Minnesota boy's adjustment to a hardscrabble existence, PW found "a wealth of lovingly recounted details" and "flashes of humor [that] serve as relief." Ages 10-up.
- serve as relief." Ages 10-up.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal
Grade 8-12-This novel opens with a rather grisly description of the death of Billy Baggs's older brother in a tractor accident. The action quickly shifts to five years later, when 13-year-old Billy is still wrestling with guilt over Robert's death. An opportunity to play summer baseball offers him some hope of regaining the equilibrium in his life, but his family's numbing rural poverty and his parents' own failure to come to grips with their son's death present further obstacles. This is not strictly a sports book, as other threads in the plot involve a pair of sexy farm sisters and accusations of rape; the beginnings of independence for Mrs. Baggs; and Billy's friendship with a slightly loony member of the baseball team. Unfortunately, not all of these threads come together at the end, and one gets the feeling that either a sequel is in the works or that Weaver tried to stuff too much into an already long text. The author also gets a few details wrong-Dodgers pitcher Sandy Koufax had already been retired for four years in 1970, but appears on the covers of all the sports magazines. The strongest parts of the story involve the gritty, unromantic descriptions of farm life, and the honest depiction of the deep emotions of the major characters. This depth of feeling makes readers really care about the family, and is probably enough to make this uneven and unruly book worth a purchase.
Todd Morning, Schaumburg Township Public Library, IL
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.