As she did in her groundbreaking memoir, Learning to Swim, Turner takes on a tough subject through luminous poetry. The result is a shattering and healing journey through one boy's loss of a parent. As the pitcher on his HS team, Mark lives and breathes baseball. Sure, there's pressure from his coach and his dad, who both push him hard, but it's nothing that time with his buddy, Eddie, or with his crush, Diane, can't diffuse. But all that changes when Mark's dad is diagnosed with cancer, and everything Mark has ever believed in—love, God, and baseball—is called into question. This profoundly affecting novel in verse traces the physical and emotional journey of a boy in crisis, and all the requisite emotions—anger, denial, fear, bargaining, sadness, & acceptance—that accompany loss.
Author
Ann Turner, also known and published as Ann Warren Turner, is a children's author and a poet. Ann Turner wrote her first story when she was eight years old. It was about a dragon and a dwarf named Puckity. She still uses that story when she talks to students about writing, to show them that they too have stories worth telling. Turner has always loved to write, but at first she was afraid she couldn't make a living doing it. So she trained to be a teacher instead. After a year of teaching, however, she decided she would rather write books than talk about them in school. Turner's first children's book was about vultures and was illustrated by her mother. She has written more than 40 books since then, most of them historical picture books. She likes to think of a character in a specific time and place in American history and then tell a story about that character so that readers today can know what it was like to live long ago. Ann Turner says that stories choose her, rather than the other way around: "I often feel as if I am walking along quietly, minding my own business, when a story creeps up behind me and taps me on the shoulder. 'Tell me, show me, write me!' it whispers in my ear. And if I don't tell that story, it wakes me up in the morning, shakes me out of my favorite afternoon nap, and insists upon being told." (from: http://www.eduplace.com/kids/tnc/mtai...)
