It's your turn at bat: Featuring Mark Riley (The Kids on the Block book series) - Hardcover

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Grade 3-6-- These first volumes in a new series each tell a different story about a character with a disability. Business . . . tells of how blind Renaldo Rodriguez tries to profit from his idea about "stepcards" for step relatives. In It's Your Turn at Bat, school newspaper sports writer Mark Riley is disgusted when he draws the topic for a school report, "The Sewing Machine: How it Changed Our Lives." Mark, wheelchair-bound with cerebral palsy, learns the importance of sewing machines and responsibility from a senior citizen. In the third book, Jennifer, who has problems with reading and writing, is afraid that her visiting Australian pen pal will reject her when she discovers that Jennifer attends special classes. Each book ends with a section of questions and answers that children might have about the disability. The books feature short chapters, lots of action, snappy dialogue, large print, and black-and-white line drawings. The format allows readers to meet the disabled characters within the context of the stories. Personalities emerge rather than stereotypes of disability. By the time that readers reach the factual section presented as the characters' answers to questions about their disabilities, the dialogue has become a chat with a friend. Humor, much appreciated by this age group, is woven throughout both the stories and the factual sections. While the series is unlikely to win awards either for writing or for illustration, it does present disabled children as they should be presented--not as stereotypes, but as individual children whose characteristics include a disability. --Constance A. Mellon, Department of Library & Information Studies, East Carolina University, Greenville, N.C.
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