The Aurora County All-Stars -Deborah Wiles

I bought this book at my daughter's school book fair a few weeks ago. I had read "Each Little Bird That Sings" by the same author a few years back so thought I'd give this one a try. By reading the jacket and looking at the picture, I knew I was in for a treat! The book combines baseball, Walt Whitman poetry, a drama queen and a pug dog! How perfect! House Jackson is the main character. He loves baseball, is motherless and reads to a dying neighbor while recovering from an injury. The book combines the fervor of a 12 year old boy, a girl named Frances (who prefers to be called Finesse) and the battle over which is more important a baseball game or a drama production. I loved it! I also thoroughly enjoyed her website/ blog entries and have copied a few of the gems below. Now -- maybe I can get my 11 year old to read it!


http://www.deborahwiles.com/


I took these quotes directly from Deborah Wiles website:

Blogging is how we are finding one another in this ever-bigger world, how we are discovering like voices and minds and hearts. I want to be a part of that discovery. So I'll write about what matters to me, and I'll keep looking for you, your voice, your mind, your heart. It's a symphony true, this searching, in whatever form it takes, as Walt Whitman wrote, as Norwood Boyd and Elizabeth Jackson said, as House Jackson learned. A symphony true:

After the dazzle of day is done
Only the dark, dark night shows to my eyes the stars
After the clangor of organ majestic, or chorus, or perfect band,
Silent, athwart my soul, moves the symphony true.




Frederick Buechner:
"My story is important not because it is mine. . . but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is yours. Maybe nothing is more important than that we keep track . . . of these stories of who we are and where we have come from and the people we have met along the way because it is precisely through these stories in all their particularity . . . that God makes himself known to each of us most powerfully and personally . . . to lose track of our stories is to be profoundly impoverished not only humanly but spiritually. I not only have my secrets, I am my secrets. And you are yours. Our secrets are human secrets, and our trusting each other enough to share them with each other has much to do with the secret of what it means to be human."