"First the rain stopped falling. Then the wheat stopped growing. Then the dust storms started coming. Then the tractor stopped working, and the jars in the cellar started dwindling, and Pa stopped joking and joshing like the words dried right up in his mouth."
Times are so hard. The have to leave the farm. This is the place where the young child Little Si is buried. Gloria is in such a rage. Everything is so unfair. She picks up a rock and hurls into the window of the bank manager's car!
"Gloria. Mae. Willard. ... I ain't ever been as mad with one of kids as I was today. Never. But I never raised a hand to you, and I'm not about to start. ... I raised you better than to be smashing things up and cussing at your sister and paying no mind whatsoever to your ma, so you knock it right off, hear?"
Gloria is the wild child of the family. She is not afraid to speak up especially about an injustice. One of the biggest of these in her life is that the boys will not take her seriously when she says she wants to play baseball. Gloria knows she is a fine pitcher but those boys won't even give her a chance.
"She'd been sneaking off whenever they practiced and hanging around the baseball diamond, waiting and hoping they'd give me a chance."
And now they have to leave their farm and Gloria will have to find a new team and start all over again to try to convince these new kids that she sure is a real fine player. What will happen on this new farm in California? The family, and all farm workers, are treated so badly by the farm manager. Picking peaches is hard, hard work. And there are so many rules. Things were bad before but now they seem way worse. At every turn the family debits are rising. But for Gloria there is one glimpse of happiness - she manages to talk her way in the boy's gang and their baseball team and there is a big game lined up with kids on the next farm. Surely, with Gloria on their team, her gang will win. And somehow this will also make things fairer for her folks and for the other workers. All of this will mean breaking the rules and keeping secrets from the adults but Gloria is so determined to win and also to expose the corruption she has witnessed among the farm bosses.
"When you don't fight for what you deserve, the world just digs its heel into you little bit more. If you don't speak up for yourself, probably no one else will ... "
This is one of those books that I just 'gobbled up'. I read it as an ebook during my recent trip. I love the way Skyler Schrempp describes the door knocking pattern - "a shave and a haircut, two bits". This book will also give readers a wonderful insight into life during the Great Depression and the beginnings of workers unions, worker saftey and workers rights. Listen to an audio sample read by the author. Here is the web page for Skyler Schrempp.
I cheered when I read the review by Betsy Bird:
Three Strike Summer? The pun in the name is the name of the game. This here’s a baseball book, loud and proud. You’re fairly sure of the fact when, in Chapter One, Glo uses her golden pitching arm to nail a rock through that car window of the bank man repossessing their house. ... I don’t know it for a fact, but suspect a person wholly unaware of the rules of the game would still get swept up in Schrempp’s storytelling. ... For me, one of the best parts of the book was an almost off-handed comment from Glo’s ma late in the story. At the beginning of the book Glo is furious and baffled by her mother’s willingness to just pick up and leave the family farm without so much as a blink. When at last Glo is able to ask her about it, almost at the end of the book, her ma says honestly, “Aw, Gloria… You couldn’t have paid me a million dollars to keep on living in a house that my baby died in.” Glo’s little brother died, probably because of the Dust Bowl, in that home. It’s so simple and so human and so understandable. Plus, I love children’s books where kids get this sudden clarifying instant where they can see everything adults have to go through and try to hide.
Here are some text quotes to give you a flavour of this writing:
"I knew that bank man was coming. I knew what he was there for. And I knew what would happen when he was done with us."
"He had taken the bank man outside so we didn't have to hear him beg."
"I wanted to belong somewhere, even if it wasn't Oklahoma. I wanted to be someone people listened to, even if I was loud sometimes and maybe said the wrong thing once in a while. ... And I wanted to play ball for real, not just by myself, knocking old apples out of a tree with a creek tone, or watching everyone else play. I wanted to be on a team."
"I missed her biscuits. I missed her breads. I missed her green beans ... I missed smoky bacon and golden, runny egg yolks. I missed her blackberry jams, dark and sweet enough to keep a smile on your face all night. And fritters fried."
"Anyone congregating in groups at any time of day will be personally escorted off the property. We employ good, decent folks here, not lazy sons of guns, not rabble-rousers, not Reds."
"Meanness is funny like that. The bigger you get the smaller, they have to make you feel."
"I just wat there trying not to see Davey falling again and again. Kicking myself for telling him to go up that ladder in the first place. Downright dumb. Downright selfish."
Companion books:
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