Shakespeare Bats Cleanup ~ Ron Koertge

yeah, I already posted about this one, but, then, I wrote more of a real "review"/brief description, so, decided to post that, too.

In Shakespeare Bats Cleanup, our main character, Kevin Boland, has been confined to his bed, due to a case of mono. He’s missing both his mom, recently deceased, and baseball: both playing and being with his friends from the baseball team. He has a decent relationship with his dad, a writer, though the fact that the dad is a writer makes Kevin not want to appear too outwardly engaged in or interested in writing.

Nevertheless, as is the case with a number of books I have read recently (Dairy Queen, The Rules of Survival), the story is not just being told in the first person (as is the case of Crispin), but is actually being written by the first person narrator as it is being told (for some reason, right now, I think this is a cool feature…). Furthermore, the writing is an element of the story that is important to pay attention to. In this case, growing out of his boredom, his dad casually handing him a composition book, and his sneaking up and grabbing one of his dad’s books on poetry (just as a kid might furtively squirrel away a Penthouse magazine, Kevin observes), he decides to experiment with writing poetry. The writing (story) that follows is a series of poems, and, as Kevin experiments with poetry, he also reflects on his world: grieving (in a very low level and not mushy way) for his mom, missing baseball and his friends while he convalesces, and providing alternately poignant and funny commentary on adolescence.

This is an easy read, in terms of density, as there is not that much text, basically, a short poem per page, with a few extending over more than one page. While it has some heavy stuff – his dead mom, for one, and his sort of loneliness at being excluded from the team while he recovers from mono – it is, at the same time, a really sweet book, especially when Kevin’s efforts to have some success in the girl department begin to be rewarded.