THE AURORA COUNTY ALL-STARS
By Deborah Wiles
Harcourt, 2007
Category: Middle-grade Fiction
I read and fell in love with EACH LITTLE BIRD THAT SINGS ages ago, and although I haven’t yet managed to read the first book in Wiles’s Aurora County trilogy (LOVE, RUBY LAVENDER), I couldn’t resist this third book when I saw it at the bookstore. The comfortable summer-day cover art, created by Marla Frazee, comes complete with slouchy baseball players and a pink tutu-sporting pug, the perfect combination for bridging the gender gap in my house. (The boys are nine and baseball is King. The girl is six and tutus—especially pink ones—are in.)
“Mr. Norwood Rhinehard Beauregard Boyd left behind a collection of black-and-white photographs, a library filled with musty books, and an ancient, pug-nosed, white dog named Eudora Welty. Later, when the long mystery that was Norwood Boyd unraveled and summer revealed its secrets, some folks would say it was the note that changed House’s life forever. Others would say it was the dog. But it was neither the note nor the dog.
It was the pageant.”
House Jackson wants no part of the dastardly pageant. First of all, he and his baseball team, the Aurora County All-Stars, have but one game a year: the fourth of July showdown with the Raleigh Redbugs. They can’t be dancing when they should be practicing! Secondly, the pageant is being directed by the one-and-only Frances Shotz … the girl who broke House’s pitching elbow last summer. Although House’s insights are occasionally mature beyond his years, I came to love him the same way I loved Comfort Snowberger in EACH LITTLE BIRD THAT SINGS, which is to say, completely. When his moment of truth comes, he steps into it boldly, becomes “more than he had been” and wins my heart.