Iva-Marie Palmer

Twelve-year-old Gabby is a golden child, and nothing can go wrong, until it does.

Gabby, the star pitcher for Luther Junior High, is about to complete her second no-hitter of the season when the game is suspended, everyone is evacuated, and the school is closed because of an asbestos situation. The young Latina is assigned to Piper Bell Academy for the duration, a very upscale private school. She creates a playbook, definitely not a mere diary, to state her goals and strategies for maintaining her status in her new school. She assumes that she will be begged to join the baseball team and achieve further greatness, all in spite of gentle warnings from her parents and best friend. But her plans go immediately, painfully awry and must be listed as losses in her book. Feeling completely vanquished, she quits baseball and joins the marvelously inept field hockey team. A bit of humble pie and determination to do the right thing brings about a satisfying conclusion. Middle-grade readers will identify with Gabby’s preteen angst, laugh at her mostly self-inflicted struggles, and cheer for her success. The playbook format, heavily illustrated with doodles and delightful action sketches, also serves the purpose of describing the characters’ physical appearances, including skin color and ethnicity, which are implied by naming conventions but never stated in the text.

Hilarious and joyful. (Fiction. 9-12)

-Kirkus Review… (meer)

Susan Klintock only joins the new high school girls' soccer team because Coach Bobby McMann is hot, but she, her friend Tina, and enough other girls stay to become a team. They are relegated to a field off campus, and their only game is against a team in Wisconsin (until Susan challenges a private school boys' team to a game at a party). Susan's parents are divorced; her mother is interviewing for better jobs, and her father is getting remarried to Polly, who's surprisingly okay. But Susan comes to realize that for all the power of her fantasies, she needs to put more effort into reality - into her friendships, and even her budding relationship with Joe.

See also: We Ride Upon Sticks by Quan Barry; Hoops by Matt Tavares

Quotes

Maybe the only way to be happy with how you looked was to never look at anyone else. (16)

Justifying the existence of a girls' soccer team suddenly felt harder than the push-ups had been. (62)

Wasn't the point of having a sibling that you had to endure your parents together? (100)

"Boys take opportunities for granted." (Bobby to Susan, 202)

"But anytime something doesn't make sense to you, you decide you just don't care about it. Being a good friend is more than just sitting at the same lunch table and going to the movies." (Tina to Susan, 216)

"I don't want you to take what I seem like for what I am like." (Tina to Susan, 219)

"Anyway, I'm going to let you continue to admire how much I have my shit together on the outside, and you're going to remember that I'm a person with feelings and ask me questions so that I can lose that same shit once in a while, okay?" (221)

I was hungry....for the kind of attention I didn't have to ask for.... (225)

And if I really wanted a win, why had I so expertly steered myself toward a loss? (232)

I'd already thought about how we each hid ferocity under aspects of our so-called girliness... (239)

I was barreling over some unspoken rule of how I was supposed to act and how angry I could get. (248)

It was new territory for me to have daydreams about something that had actually happened and I hadn't made up. (269)

"And I know hurt and disappointment are survivable feelings." (Mom to Susan, 282)

But maybe two women who approached how to be a woman in completely different ways didn't have to feel like threats to each other. (284)

"When you know the person you like hanging out with best, why waste time hanging out with people who aren't her?" (Joe, 315)

Candace was right: I did live in a fantasy land, and I'd let it wreck my reality. (335)

"I guess you try not to let disappointments turn you into someone who stops trying." (Polly, 341)… (meer)

I love it when a book surprises me. And this one really did. I honestly wasn’t expecting very much out of it. But this was a fun read that explores first love and also, women’s sports!

It’s set in 1979 in the US. And while I have lived here for some years now, I didn’t know about how Title IX (established in 1972) was set down to establish access to any activity that receives Federal financial assistance, and that includes sports. So in this high school, a new athletics coach arrives to set up a girl’s soccer team.

It helps very much that he is good looking and wears shorts when he’s first introduced to the school. The shorts “hugged his butt like it was a package wrapped by an overachieving Christmas elf”. And lots of girls sign up for the soccer tryouts. Most of them drop out though, not realising soccer means more than standing around and ogling the cute coach.

Susan sticks it out, along with some of her friends. She begins to enjoy the game, and is getting to be quite good at it. But there aren’t many other girls’ teams to play against (they only have one game set up by their coach). She still has this hope that she’ll get close to Coach Bobby. And her infatuation for a teacher may mean that she’s missing out on some more age-appropriate boys.

It was especially interesting for me to learn about Title IX and the attitude that people had towards girls in sports at that time. One of the most amusing moments is when the parent of a boy Susan baby-sits sees her practising and asks if it has affected her menstruation. Oh boy. I suppose this was some kind of old-fashioned way of thinking that sports and exercise affects a woman’s ability to have children? Luckily Susan and her teammates chime in.

Susan is a great character – flawed, definitely, but she learns and grows so much, not just about her attitude towards sports and boys, but also with her relationships with her friends and family.

Gimme Everything You Got was a surprising, funny, fearlessly feminist read!… (meer)

A feel-good salute to the end of the 1970s that reads like you're playing an emotional pinball machine. Susan is drifting through her junior year along with her two best friends. Her divorced parents get along, something that puzzles her, but both irritate her frequently. She's mastered the art of gratifying her sexual needs, perhaps a bit too well, as every time she considers dating a guy at her school, they pale in comparison to her fantasies. When the school hires Bobby McMann, a hot twenty-something, as the new girls' soccer coach, Susan, along with almost every other girl begins drooling. She signs up for the team, mostly because of the fantasies she seems to generate at will, but as the story progresses and practice gets real...and hard, her motivation for staying on the team changes. It manages to survive some very embarrassing moments, not only for her, but for those she's close to. In the end, she's done a lot of growing up and has learned to look at live in a very different way. Read the book to see how that happens. I suspect you'll enjoy it as much as I did. It's a very good choice for libraries valuing strong, but flawed teen girls as protagonists.… (meer)