Keeping Score

Park, L.S. (2008). Keeping Score. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Summary: Maggie-O Fortini, named after Yankees great Joe DiMaggio, is a young girl growing up in Brooklyn in the 1950s. She loves her family, friends, her father’s fire station, and, yes, baseball. Maggie-O can’t play baseball (she’s a girl, remember), but she can do the next best thing: keep track of every strike, hit, and double-play for the team that is number 1 in heart, the Brooklyn Dodgers. She befriends Jim, a firefighter at her father’s fire station. Jim teaches Maggie how to track each and every play in her beloved team’s unsuccessful bid at winning the World Series. In time Jim is drafted and travels to Korea to fight in the war. Their friendship continues through an exchange in letters until the summer of 1952 when Jim’s letters abruptly stop. While Maggie fears the worst, she learns that Jim has been deeply affected by the war and has mentally withdrawn from the rest of the world. The book traces Maggie’s love for the game, her desperate attempts to try and help the Dodgers win the series, and most of all, her desire to help her friend in his time of need.

Read-Alikes: Two books that might be of interest to readers who like Keeping Score are The Homerun King by Patricia McKissik, the story of two brothers growing up during the Great Depression. The boys host a baseball player from the Negro league and hope to start a baseball team of their own. In addition, Fran Hurcomb’s Going Places might also be of interest to readers. Similar to Keeping Score, it features a female as its main character. The girls in Going Places hope to start a girls hockey team, however, not all residents in their town are happy about it. Their detractors use vandalism as a way of scaring them off.

Discussion Questions:
1. Why did Maggie feel so compelled to help the Dodgers baseball team? How did the ways in which she helped the team change throughout the book?
2. Which do you believe was more important to Maggie: helping her favorite team win or helping Jim? Explain why you feel this way.

Note: There are a number of questions available at the back of the book that would make nice discussion questions as well.

Author website: www.lindasuepark.com