The Fastest Woman on Earth by Francesca Cavallo, Luis san Vicente

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This is a remarkable story of a truly strong female character in real life who overcame a childhood inability to use her legs, and abandonment by her birth mother, to grow into being a competitor in the Paralympics and other contests, from sprinting to marathons, and winning scores of medals, including seven Paralympic golds.

Tatyana was abandoned at a home for kids in Russia, and spent many years there, getting around using her hands for legs for her first six years, because the home could not afford a wheelchair for her. This made her arms very strong. Deborah McFadden happened to visit this home as a commissioner of disabilities working with the US Health Department, and ended up adopting Tatyana, who then went on to her successes in school and in pursuing higher education academic studies.

This is a great introductory book not only to this outstanding athlete, but also to the Paralympics and to people with disabilities. I commend it as a worthy read.

Soccernomics by Simon Kuper, Stefan Szymanski

Rating: WARTY!

If you look at an older version of this book, which is what I read, you will see this on the cover: "Why England Loses, why Spain, Germany and Brazil win, and why the US, Japan, Australia, and even Iraq are destined to become the kings of the world's most popular sport." A more recent edition had this: "Why England Loses, why Germany and Brazil win, and why the US, Japan, Australia, Turkey, and even Iraq are destined to become the kings of the world's most popular sport."

Notice the changes? That's because this book is full of shit. It cherry picks its data (and there's precious little of that) to support the predetermined theses of the authors. Once in a while there's a rare nugget, but most of the good advice in this book is nothing more than commonsense, and most of the 'data' is nothing more than a few choice anecdotes which prove nothing. I don't think anyone with common sense would try to argue that statistics cannot be of value to the soccer world, but the authors really don't make that case here.

The big problem is that the book is regularly self-contradictory, negating in a later chapter what it only just got through asserting as a 'solid fact' in an earlier one. In short, it's a mess. It's way too long and rambling. It could be literally half as long and make the same points, but it would still be wrong. The volume I read was last updated in 2014, and here we are, and the US, Japan, Australia, Turkey, and even Iraq are not kings of the sport or anywhere near. I was just reading a coupel of days ago that United States will miss its third straight Olympic men’s soccer tournament. And Brazil hasn't done so much winning lately, either! Not that the book really makes an effort to explain why they're supposed to - and not that it really talks much about south American football.

One thing they really didn't cover in terms of international football, is something they mentioned briefly in team sports which is that picking the best players doesn't necessarily mean you have the best team. The players have to work well together, so it's not enough to buy the best forwards, midfielders and defenders, you have to buy the best who can integrate into a team to really get the results you want. I don't think they pursued that anywhere near as strenuously as they ought to have. Instead they seemed to be focusing on everything else, some of which was nonsense.

The book's main thrust is almost entirely on Europe which is quite plainly wrong. Europe has a strong football tradition, but it's far from the only region of the world which has such a tradition these days, and the book says literally nothing about women's football, like it doesn't exist, which begs the question: why the sexism? And why are women's international games producing significantly different results than the men's games? That's certainly a question worth exploring but it's not even touched on here. I can't commend this because it's very poorly done and does nothing to offer original or penetrating answers to the questions it poses.

Jesse Owens by Maria Isabel Sanchez Vegara, Anna Katharina Jansen

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Jesse Owens was someone deserving of the sobriquet 'legend' but somehow, he was forgotten far too soon to enjoy it. had he been white, that might not have happened, but had he been white, his blazing trail across the athletic world would carry far less weight than it does.

Something this book doesn't make clear is that his actual name was James Cleveland Owens. He went by 'JC', but when he was inducted into his new school, the person writing down the names didn't understand him and thought he was saying 'Jesse'. The name stayed with him ever since.

He grew up in a large family - ten children, which is far too many for poor parents to support, but had he never been born he could never have made the impact he did. He was notable for his running speed even at an early age, and his gym teacher was so impressed with him that he allowed him special training privileges so he could fit his athletics in alongside his work - work that was necessary to help support his family.

He became renowned in his own lifetime after he set three world records and tied another at the 1935 Big Ten track meet in Ann Arbor, Michigan, something that's been described as "the greatest 45 minutes ever in sport" and which has never been repeated by anyone.

Perhaps his biggest triumph was sticking it to Adolf Hitler at the 1938 Olympics. While the dictator of the Aryan race, who considered black people to be inferior, sat and watched, Owens won four gold medals. Hitler couldn't even take pride in the fact that in an early case of sponsorship, Owens was wearing German running shoes made by the founder of the Adidas athletics-wear company!

This was an intriguing and educational book for young kids, and I commend it fully.

Chi Running by Danny Dreyer, Katherine Dreyer

Rating: WARTY!

I'm not a runner although I do really need to get back to exercising more this year, but I was intrigued by what this author had to say and in the end I have to report disappointment. My version (more on this anon) is 320 pages of largely fluff, with occasional interesting bits sown throughout, but you have to read very closely and pay attention to catch those bits as they fly by in what seems like nothing but an endless prologue. I've never read a book that seemed so intent upon disguising the very topic it claims to promote.

Let me say up front that all this business about 'chi' and 'prana' and so on is patent bullshit. There is no such thing. If there were, scientists would have found it by now. The author claims early in the book that "Chi...generates movement in the physical world and is that which animates life." If by 'chi' the author means adenosine triphosphate then they're correct. If not, then this is pure nonsense! What's really confusing though is that the B&N website has two print versions of this book, each with a different cover, one having 320 pages, the other having only 288 pages. The one with fewer pages costs two dollars more. Why? It's chi! Don't question it!

None of this necessarily that the author has nothing valuable to say about improving your running technique. For e, the problem was that even when the book confined itself purely to that, it often made no sense. The author at one point was talking about two forces that are claimed to be at play when you run: gravity, and the road! I'm sorry, but these are the same thing. To be more specific, there is only gravity (and yes, there's your kinetic energy as you move forward, but that's not what's being talked about). Gravity is what pulls you to the road, your legs are what propel you up from it. The force of the road is no more than the resistance of it to gravity trying to pull you down to the center of the globe!

Worse, the examples serve only to obfuscate, not clarify. One of the important points that is made is that you should move your feet to support your body, so you land with your foot flat underneath your center of mass, rather than stretch it out to land on your heel or your toe. This is the main secret to preventing leg injuries such as shin splints and knee problems we're told, but the example used here to illustrate it is the Warner Brothers cartoon Road Runner about which the author says "He had a great lean, while his feet are spinning behind him." Now I personally claim no great insight into the Road Runner's gender. The author seems quite certain, but I'll let that go.

The thing is that this idea of the feet behind the body is precisely the opposite of the technique we're supposedly being taught, which insists that your feet land directly under you. That's the chi running technique in a nutshell, FYI: let your body lead, pulling you forward, and as gravity pulls it down to the ground, place your feet directly under your center of mass to keep your body from falling. In this way you can, we're assured, improve your running and avoid injury.

The problem is that you're still moving your legs forward and pushing off the ground and you can only do this with your toes. You do have a certain amount of momentum once you get going, but without that propelling leverage off the ground with your toes on each stride, you will stop! Or fall flat on your face if you quit putting your feet under you. One or the other. The explanation we're given claims that you really don't need to call upon your leg muscles to run, which is nonsensical throughout, and you cannot run without injury if you're trying to propel yourself forward while your foot is flat on the ground. That for sure will injure tendons.

The author doesn't quite get the first law of motion as expressed by Isaac Newton. It's really the definition of inertia, which people too often mistake for a couch potato, but inertia doesn't mean unmoving, it means unchanging in terms of motion: not only things which are sitting still remaining at rest, but also things which are in motion remaining in motion until and unless they're acted on by an unbalanced force. So the author's right in that your body will not move unless you employ your legs to move it (in this scenario), but this is in direct contradiction to claims at other points in the book that you don't need to hit the ground with your feet to propel yourself forward!

There are pictures in the book aimed at illustrating the techniques discussed, but those often are unclear. One of them which was clear refutes this claim about landing on the flat of your foot rather than your heel, because the third picture in the sequence (figure 57) shows the heel of the foot hitting the ground first! Figure 59 of this same sequence of six photos, shows the leg pushing-off with the toes, so the images that supposedly show the correct technique show the very thing we're purportedly being warned against! Either that or the explanation we're being given is, again, obfuscatory rather than explanatory.

Some of the illustrations themselves are problematical in another way because, as for example in figure 42, the illustration has light text on a light background which is impossible to read. Another (figure 41) which supposedly shows correct technique, has a circular diagram at the lower legs, showing (we're expected to believe) the circular motion of the feet, but feet do not move in a circular motion when running. The foot that's in the air in this image isn't going any higher. It will not complete a circle before hitting the ground again! It's going to swing back and hit the ground in the shortest way possible. The feet therefore move much more like a pendulum below the clock, not like the hands on the clock face! If the author had something else in mind, it was not clear from the writing.

So I have to say I cannot recommend this book at all. Maybe if you're really interested and can get it for free or at a close-out, it may offer useful tips for you, but for my money, I pass. The book does not.

Roller Girl by Victoria Jamieson

Rating: WORTHY!

This was a graphic novel, apparently based on personal experience, about a twelve-year old girl going through typical 12-year-old experiences, except that in this case, she becomes fascinated by the so-called sport of roller derby. I say so-called because one thing which isn't covered here - or even mentioned - is the risk of concusion from a sport like this. Worse, concussion has been show to disproportionately affect women more than it does men, with women taking some fifty percent longer to recover from it than men do, so that's worth keeping in mind for this or any sport where the head is at risk of violence being done to it.

Main character Astrid has been best friends with Nicole for what seems like forever, but comes the summer of their twelfth year, and they each want different things. Nicole wants to go to Ballet camp. Astrid, overwhelmed by her first trip to a roller derby, wants to go to derby camp. Her blithe assumption that Nicole will fall in with her plans means Astrid is in for a rude and unnerving awakening.

I'm not a fan of so-called sports that encourage violence and conflict, but this story was amusing enough that even while I disapprove of the sport, I'm willing to consider this graphic novel a worthy read. Astrid has to learn to stand on her own two feet with Nicole gone, and that's not easy on skates! Plus, she lies to her mother about the fact that Nicole isn't going to derby camp with her. The derby work is hard and Astrid is brand new to it, so it's a long learning curve for her, but eventually she picks up the rhythms and skills, and she finds her place.

The story, the second I have liked by this author, had humor and heart, and the art was pretty decent, so I consider this a worthy read.

An Olympic Dream by Reinhardt Kleist

Rating: WORTHY!

This was a sad, sad graphic novel telling the true story (as near as such a rendering can reasonably get to the truth), about Samia Yusuf Omar, Translated from the original German by Ivanka Hahnenberger, this tells in a 150 or so pages in black and white line drawings, of how Samia competed and came last in her heat in the 2008 Olympic Games and yet garnered for herself cheers louder than the winner did.

Always game, following her dream, plucky to a fault, and never allowing brutality and indifference to dampen her spirit, she decided she wanted to get to the 2012 Olympics in London, and the only way to do that under a brutal, women-repressive regime that an extremist Islamic group brought to Somalia, was for her to flee the country and go through Sudan and Libya, to get on a boat to Italy and beyond.

She did all of this, often alone and usually without much money, always being brutalized by the savage and avarice-driven scum who preyed on these poor refugees that certain equally savage and misogynistic presidents would callously turn away at the doorstep, Samia made it onto a boat which promptly ran out of fuel. Fortunately a passing Italian ship spotted them and began to haul them aboard, but Samia fell into the ocean and drowned before she could be pulled out. Yes, there are more important things in the world than plastic straws, but why would anyone with real power be bothered with these "shit-hole countries".

I commend this as a worthy and essential read about what happens to people who reside in brutal countries where there's no oil 'to make it worthwhile going in'....

Saving the Team by Alex Morgan, Full Fathom Five

Rating: WARTY!

If I'd known beforehand that this was a Full Fathom Five product, I would never have picked it off the library shelf, but I didn't learn this until later. I expected better from someone of Alex Morgan's Stature.

Anyway, after enjoying this year's women's world cup I discovered that one of the US team's leading scorers, Alex Morgan, had written a middle-grade series about girls' soccer. At least I can only assume she wrote it. It is Full Fathom Five after all, so who knows? Since I'd written my own YA novel about a girl who gets to play soccer in the English men's professional league, I was curious as to how a professional player would write a soccer story, so I checked this out of the library.

I have to say I was disappointed in it in several ways, not just in the story telling. I can't speak for middle-grade girls, but this wasn't quite what I was expecting and the story was a bit too black and white, traditional, and safe for my taste: the inattentive adults, the evil bully girl, the oh-so-wonderful instant friends, the 'problems' that are not really problems. To me it felt a bit young and simplistic for today's middle graders.

The basic plot is that Devin moves from the west coast to the east coast meaning it's the trope 'new girl in school' garbage that's already been done to death. Could Morgan not have added a bit of an original twist here? Aren't strikers supposed to be inventive? I guess she really wasn't very inventive in the world cup. Yes, she admirably took the goals as the chances presented themselves, scoring five of hers in that first easy game, but she really didn't have to work for any of them, did she? She certainly didn't make them with inventive and incisive runs through the defense; for the most part she simply stood there and then took advantage of the opening when the ball came right to her. She's no Marta Vieira da Silva, that's for sure.

You know there's a lot been said about the US behavior in that first game - about scoring so many goals against Thailand, but I never had a problem with that. You get the chance, you score. It's almost a knee-jerk reaction, and no one can complain about the confidence-building and experience credits it brings to a player, especially in an opening game. No, my problem was that the US's extravagant celebration of each goal was way out of proportion to the effort it took to get it. They were humiliating poor Thailand and reveling in it. That's cold. That's callous. I expect better of a women's team. Morgan herself writes on p85 of this very novel, "There's a mercy rule in soccer, right?" as Devin's team is being roundly beaten. How hypocritical that was.

If they'd faced a tough, seasoned, team (as they did each game once they were into the knock-out rounds where their scoring dropped precipitously from that first game and came to rely more than once on penalty goals), then celebrating like that after a score is entirely appropriate, because it's hard work scoring against a team like those, and players deserve that kind of celebratory release, but shaming a poorer team which doesn't have the resources the US team had and which isn't going to get paid the third of a million dollars that each of the US players will end up with (and that excludes any endorsements they may get) is disgraceful in my opinion and far beneath the conduct I'd expect of a team which has the status and power that the US team enjoys. It was white players beating down the brown players and loving it, and that's never a good thing.

Equality isn't only about pay (which the US women's team definitely deserves having earned actually more than the US men's team has over the last few years). It's about everyone having an equal chance. The Thai team is new to the cup and had nowhere near the experience and resources the US team had. The Argentinian team had to fight bigotry and prejudice and a complete lack of support in their struggle to have a national women's team. The US deserves equal pay and no one in their right mind would argue otherwise, but that said, the US also enjoys privilege and status which many other women's teams are still fighting desperately for. We'd be fools to forget that this is bigger than the US team. Much bigger.

But I digress! As usual! So what's with this Alex Morgan obsession with California - like it's some exotic foreign country that Devin can't get over? Could it be that Morgan herself is from California and perhaps now has a thoroughly warped view about how super-human the soccer players are and how they dress far in advance of the rest of the country? Yeah, five of the US 23-member team were native Californians, but three hailed from Georgia and two each from Arizona, New Jersey, and New York state, so whence this outlandish praise for California soccer? Bias - again! Remember this is where players were born, not necessarily where they blossomed and learned how to became the world-class players they are today.

It's nice that the cover of this novel depicted such a diversity of people: Asian, Black, and white, but if you look at photos of the USWNT, it's almost entirely white. There were only three black players on the team of 23 - and not a single Asian or Latinx player. Yes, of course they have to pick the best players, but what does it say about us if we can find the best only among white players? Whence equality there? Where is our melting pot of diversity and opportunity?

That said, the book cover doesn't remotely reflect the characters in the novel - and pink boots? Really? And the art is by a female artist who once again evidently never read the novel. The only pink mentioned in the novel is of a headband and a top. Never boots. How about a picture of real live girls - real soccer players on the cover - not models, not cartoon characters? Is that too much to ask? I guess it is from what's been roundly touted as a book mill, but more on that later.

Morgan has Devin stupidly following along with these Californians like a bleating lamb. "Mom, I must have flip-flops!" (or words to that effect) she cries after their team tryout! (Disclosure - I am biased against flip-flops. I think they're stupid, cheap, and nasty, but then I'm not the one writing a novel advocating about them! Although now, I think maybe I'll put in a couple of words about them in this novel I'm currently working on! LOL!). My point here is that once again Morgan could have made Devin stand out by making her an individual instead of a lamb, but no. She doesn't want that. Maybe she thinks individuals have no place in team sports, but if that's so I'd have to ask her "Did Megan Rapinoe get to be the figure she is today by blending in?" Hell no! Learn something from your teammates, Morgan!

There was at least one grammar issue that I recall, where Morgan apparently doesn't understand the difference between criteria and criterion (p8). The former is plural, the latter singular, and Morgan uses the wrong one. Now you can argue that this was written in first person by a twelve-year-old, so maybe it was the youngster who got it wrong and not the university-educated author who is more than twice her age, but this comes back to how you want your main character to appear, doesn't it?

Do do you want her to sound illiterate and dumb? I guess that's the choice the author of this novel leaned into. It's one of many problems with first person voice stories which is why I rail against them. Do you really want to write the novel in a way that makes it as dumb as your character might be? Because that doesn't make for great reading in my book. On the other hand, if you have a dumb character and write her in first person, but write literately, then do you betray that character and your entire story? This is why third person is nearly always the wisest choice. First person doesn't bring immediacy, it brings a complete lack of realism and dearth of suspense which overwhelms your rather desperate substitution of first person for immediacy.

So by now you must know that I did not like this story. It felt wrong, too fluffy, inauthentic, too easy, and far too predictable. Yes, they do beat their bedeviling team at the end, and it's no spoiler to say that, but that victory comes out of nothing - no sweat, no tears and certainly no blood (which is probably a good thing!). Maybe middle-grade girls will like this story, but if they do, I feel sorry for them that they settle for so little when they could have so much more. Surely this, right now, in the midst of the afterglow from the US women's victory on a world stage, is when we ought to be strongly-pushing for more and better for our girls?

All of that aside, the biggest reason for avoiding this series like the plague is that it's copyright not to Alex Morgan, but to Alex Morgan and "Full Fathom Five" which is the book mill run by businessman James Frey, which begs the question as to whether Morgan even wrote it at all. In January 2006, The Smoking Gun published an article online titled: "A Million Little Lies: Exposing James Frey's Fiction Addiction" alleging that James Frey simply made up large parts of his memoirs. The next month, Frey apologized for these fabrications. Full Fathom Five was the subject of an article in New York magazine: "James Frey's Fiction Factory" (November 2010) which is still available online as of this posting date. You should read it: http://nymag.com/arts/books/features/69474/. For me, I would advise avoiding this series like the plague. I feel it does a disservice to women's soccer and women in general for that matter.

Real by Takehiko Inoue

Rating: WARTY!

I've not had a lot of success with Manga. Reading a book 'backwards' doesn't come naturally to me(!), but I've made it through one or two that have proven themselves to be worthy reads. This one wasn't. I'd thought it might be interesting given that it features a wheelchair-bound protagonist, but it's not a story about a person with a handicap. It's a story about basketball which happens to feature a person with a handicap. That's not the same thing and the book suffers for it.

Now I know you can argue that it should not be about the handicap - and I agree that far. You can argue that it should be about basketball, and I agree that far, but if you're going to write about basketball and just put one of your characters in a wheelchair and not write about that at all, then what have you done other than to gratuitously include a person with a disability merely for the sake of it? (And that's sayk, not saky! LOL!)

While the wheelchair shouldn't dominate the story unless there's really something weird going on, like a wheelchair version of Stephen King's Christine (which I haven't read), then the wheelchair has to have a role in the story just like any other character because it's either a character or it's a cynical and cheap attempt at diversity without having a thing to say about diversity. Aside from that issue, the story was boring. It didn't offer anything new and worse, it was hard to follow what the hell was actually going on here at times, so I ditched this pretty quickly, especially when skimming through more pages didn't offer me any hope that the story would improve.

Fast Forward by Adam Skinner

Rating: WORTHY!

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This was a fun book, especially for me who isn't really into motor sports. I have been to one or two races myself and I'm always interested in potential topics for novels, so this felt like a good book to review and I guessed right!

The book is quite short, but full-color illustrations of tracks, cars, and drivers, and a wealth of facts on cars, circuits, and interesting events make it seem a lot bigger than it is. It covers circuits and featured cars as follows:

• Nürburgring - Porsche 911 GT2 RS
• Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps - McClaren MP4/4 Honda
• Suzuka - Honda NSX
• Circuit des 24 Heures du Mans - Ford GT40 Mk 2
• Albert Park Lake - Maserati 250F
• Circuit de Monaco - BRM P57
• Monza - Ferrari F1-2000
• Goodwood - Jaguar E-Type 4.2
• Daytona - 1970 Plymouth Superbird
• Bahrain International - Red Bull RB8
• Dakar Rally - Mitsubishi Pajero 2005
• Indianapolis Motor Speedway - Lotus 38
• Pikes Peak - Drive eO PP03
• Silverstone - Aston Martin DB5
• Hockenheimring Baden-Württemberg - Williams FW23
• Shanghai International Circuit - Holden Commodore VZ
• Laguna Seca - Dodge Viper ACR
• Mount Panorama - Holden Torana A9X

There's a short glossary and a longer index at the end, and rest assured it's not just about cars and tracks, the book also has assorted drivers of note and yesteryear highlighted on each page (such as Juan Manuel Fangio, Jutta Kleinschmidt, Michael Schumacher, Jackie Stewart, Alex Zanardi, and a score of others) including career masterpieces, amazing wins, tragic deaths, come-from-behind wins, fistfights, track and racing records, and amazing escapes from accidents.

I found this book fascinating and educational, and I commend it as a worthy read.

Pelé the King of Soccer by Eddy Simon, Vincent Brascaglia, Joe Johnson

Rating: WORTHY!

Written by Eddy Simon and translated by Joe Johnson, with illustrations by Vincent Brascaglia, this was an enjoyable graphic novel about the remarkable career of Edson Arantes do Nascimento, better known to the world as Pelé, who was an outstanding Brazilian professional soccer player.

He played for a club team at the tender age of fifteen and for his national team at the age of sixteen; at seventeen, he put in a sterling performance at the 1958 World Cup, the first of three in which Brazil won with him on the team. He's the only player to have been on three world cup winning teams, and he scored 77 goals in 92 games during those competitions. He averaged almost a goal a game throughout his career, scoring some 650 in 694 professional club appearances.

There was a less stellar side to his life in his multiple marriages and multiple affairs outside of those marriages, some of which brought offspring. The story doesn't delve very much into those or his son's conviction for money laundering. It keeps the focus mostly on soccer, recounting his career almost game by game.

This graphic novel tells the story well, with lively, colorful, and well-crafted illustrations, from his barefoot, ball-made-of-rags street soccer days of his early age, to this triumphs as a professional (in soccer boots and with a real ball!). His hero was his father who was also a professional player until he got a bad leg injury and could play no more, but he encouraged his son to excel and Pelé did not let him down. I commend this novel as a worthy read and a piece of sports history that's well-worth learning.

The Hockey Saint by Howard Shapiro

Rating: WARTY!

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This is the second in a kind of series or collection aimed at telling a buoyant, life-affirming story and I'm afraid I was no more impressed with this than I was the first one. This story is about a relationship which develops between an established major hockey star and a college hockey player.

One major problem reported by other reviewers is that the college player, Tom Leonard, looks more like a girl than a guy for some reason, and while I agree with this perception, I don't see how it would be a problem, except in that Tom looks way too young to be a 21-year-old college student, so while it's entirely conceivable that a very young-looking, feminine-looking person could well play hockey in college, it's a bit distracting from the story.

A second, similar complaint was about the Jesus-clone of a hockey player who some people complained appeared to be too old for the character he was supposed to be. I disagree with that. While the long hair did seem a bit much, I didn't have any other problem with his appearance. It was his behavior and attitude which bothered me. He lived a hugely secret life and this would have been fine, except that no reason was offered for it except some half-hearted and rather mealy-mouthed comments the guy makes about being misunderstood. It seemed inauthentic and irrelevant to the story. One of the secrets was that he was married to the woman he was, in public, passing off as his cousin! That was just weird.

According to the blurb, Tom is supposed to be sorting through issues that are "both very real and seemingly insurmountable," but I saw no such issues on his plate. He did cause problems for himself, such as being trusted with the responsible position of assistant captain of his team, and promising the coach he won't let him down, and then blowing off the first chance he has to keep his word. This made me view him as a dick and a slacker, and that perception never improved.

One of the things the blurb mentions is that Tom's perception of his hockey hero is a bit too golden, but after all the sports and celebrity scandals we've had, Tom would have to be a blind and deaf choir-boy to imagine someone was flawless or some sort of paragon, which would make him a complete idiot.

I did not like anything about this story, and it made little sense to me. It was far from being inspiring as I'm sure was intended. I cannot recommend it.

Sadia by Colleen Nelson

Rating: WORTHY!

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

The story is about displaced and immigrant Middle-East young Muslim girls in Canada. Sadia Ahmadi is fifteen years old. She and her family left Syria when her father got a teaching post at a University in Winnipeg, which is the capital city of Manitoba, a Canadian province. Winnipeg sits some seventy miles north of the North Dakota-Minnesota state line. It's cold up there at this time of year! it's 5° Fahrenheit, or minus fifteen Celsius as I write this! The average low in January is minus twenty one! Even in August it doesn't breach eighty (25°C), and it's down to the fifties (12°C) at night. Call me a wuss, but that's way too cold for me! You have to be tough to live in Canada!

By moving when they did, Sadia's family missed the Syrian civil war. Sadia has some mixed feelings about the move and her new homeland, but she gets a real education as to how lucky she is when Amira Nasser, a refugee, ends up at Sadia's school having left everything behind in Syria to escape the not-so-civil war. Now she's in a strange land with different customs and language and she's expected to integrate and learn. Sadia is assigned by her school (Laura Secord High School) to help her get up to speed. Laura Secord is (or was) a real person - a Canadian hero of the 1812 war.

But the story isn't about Amira; neither is it about Sadia's best friend Nazreen Hussani who originally hailed from Egypt. Instead, these two are rather employed to represent the trope angel and the devil sitting on Sadia's shoulders. Amira is very much a traditional Muslim girl. Nazreen is a rebel who removes her hijab and conservative clothing as soon as she gets to school, replacing them only before she leaves to head home. Sadia has issues with this and while she tries to maintain their friendship, she also feels increasing tension, dissent, and distance between herself and Nazreen. She feels pulled between these two extremes, yet tries to find her own path.

The thing which seems to erode the rough edges, and bring all these girls together is basketball. It is Sadia's passion. She has the chance to be on a co-ed team which enters a small tournament. Everything seems to be going great until the finals, when one of the teams objects to Sadia wearing what is a suitable outfit for a strict Muslim girl to play a sport in public, but which the opposing team finds objectionable, and which we're told is contrary to the official rules of the game.

On a point of order, it really isn't. The problem is that there is a slow turn-around time for professional publishing houses - a lag between the author finishing a novel and it being published. I don't know when the author wrote this or how long it was between her signing-off on the finished copy and the publishing date (which is this month) but as it happens, the rules in basketball got changed early last year in Canada to allow religious headwear (with certain restrictions), so I chose to assume that events in this novel took place before that date! Full disclosure here: the publisher, Dundurn, is the largest Canadian-owned publisher, and I am on their auto approved list on Net Galley, for which I am grateful since I tend to like what they publish.

Just as importantly, a young girl named Amina Mohamed of the Dakota Collegiate in Winnipeg came up with a design for headwear that meets both Muslim restrictions and basketball regulations. In the novel, it's Nazreen who comes up with this idea. There's no acknowledgement to Amina, so I'm wondering if this book was locked-down before that item got into the news. Perhaps in future editions, the author can acknowledge Amina Mohamed's accomplishment.

The story itself, though, was well-told and moving. It did bring to the fore the issues Muslims have when trying to live in Western society and stay true to their faith: the restrictions, the difficulties, the prejudices and the outright racism in some cases. I'm not religious at all, so some of these issues struck me as trivial, but that's certainly not how they feel to people who are invested in faith, so I let that go, but what did bother me is that there are deeper issues which the author did not explore. The most outrageous of these is the appalling gender bias that seems to go hand-in-hand with far too many organized religions (and not a few disorganized ones as well, for that matter).

If the purpose of covering a woman's body is to prevent inciting passions, then it seems to me to be doomed from the off, because when a woman is completely covered, doesn't that in a way inflame an embarrassing number of the male half of the population with curiosity and desire to know what's under there? Of course you could argue that no matter how a woman dresses, but this is actually the other half of this problem: while all the pressure is placed upon women to tone down their dress (whether it's Muslim dress or even western dress as it happens), none is placed upon men to tone down their behavior and it was this which the Quran addressed first!

The whole idea of covering a woman up isn't only an insult to the woman, it's also an insult to the men in its implicit assertion that they're so lacking in self-control that women need to be hidden under blankets lest their very appearance cause the men to become serial rapists. That whole idea is absurdist and wrong-headed to me and says far more about the men who promote these ideas than ever it does about the women who have suffered and continue to suffer under this oppressive and cruel patriarchal hegemony.

The Quran is quite explicit in terms of modesty, but this requirement did not so much address clothing as partition between the genders, and it does not apply solely to women! It applies to men, too, yet in this story, we find no issues raised over the boys, only over the girls. I thought this ought to have been delved into a little. What;s good for the goose is worth taking a gander!

Why must girls wear a head covering (which technically is a khimar, 'hijab' having a more general meaning) and not the boys? I think there is some mileage to be had there, especially when telling a story of this nature. On a related, but slightly different topic, one of the things Nazreen did in her little rebellion against conformity was to wear (when she did wear them!) very colorful Khumur (the plural of khimar).

Personally, I have no problem with what women wear (or don't wear!), it's their choice, but I can't help wonder how making a Khimar more attractive meets the stated purpose of the garment in the first place, which as I understand it, is to promote a modest appearance. Isn't it less modest to make yourself stand out? Indeed, in western society, wearing a Khimar in the first place is rare enough that it makes a woman stand out more than if she went bare-headed, so this seems to me to be in conflict with the whole purpose of a head covering if it's to detract from attention! That's all I'm going to say on that topic, although I certainly reserve the right to go into it in some future novel of mine!

On a minor technical issue, and prefacing this by saying that I'm not a basketball fan and I certainly don't pretend to be an expert on rules: as far as I know in regular play, once a basket is sunk, the ball goes to the other team! There's no rebound to be had and you certainly can't try to score again. So when we read that Jillian scored a trhee-pointer and then "Allan grabbed the rebound to shoot again" I had to ask: what rebound? There's no rebound from a sunk basket! And even if there were, you can't just grab the ball and shoot again! The possession devolves to the defending team. I'm thinking that the author was conflating regular play here with taking a free throw during which - if the ball rebounds - a player can grab it and take a shot. But like I said, it's a minor issue and we all manage to let a few of those get by if we're honest!

So in conclusion, the novel felt maybe a little young for high school, but then the students were only on the cusp of the high school experience, so perhaps I'm being too judgmental there. Or maybe just mental! I felt there were some issues with this as I've mentioned, more in the omission than the commission, but overall, the novel was a worthy read and I recommend it, especially for the intended age range.

Team Fugee by Dirk McLean

Rating: WARTY!

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This was a short book aimed at middle grade readers, but I'm not sure how well it will be received. Obviously I'm not in that age group, but I can still appreciate a good novel and this one did not feel that way. It was too choppy, the story being told more in a series of cameos than in a flowing style. Problems in the plot seemed to arise from out of nowhere, and to be resolved with little difficulty.

The soccer descriptions were not very good. I got the impression that the author knew little about soccer and had done some reading, but still hadn’t quite grasped it. For example, at one point there's a description of a penalty kick, but what the author describes is not a penalty kick - it’s a free kick, with players standing by each of the goal posts and a wall of five boys in front of the goal. No! That's not a penalty kick! With a penalty, it's just the kicker and the goalkeeper! That's it! There's no one else. This as a big fail, and will be noticed by any kid who knows anything about soccer.

At another point the author describes some kids "struggling to pump their ball." This confused me at first until I realized they were trying to inflate the ball, with a pump that didn't work properly. I'm not Canadian and for all I know maybe Canadians describe inflating the ball like that, but it seemed odd and won't play well to an international audience. It’s a minor thing, but these things count, especially when there are lots of them.

The story involved two soccer teams which formed of their own accord at the school, one comprised of Syrian refugees, the other Nigerian refugees. That's where the title of the novel comes from: reFUGEE. I didn't realize that the title should be pronounced with a soft G, so the title made no sense at all until I read the novel. Because of this, the story was in a sense rather racist. Essentially the only people who were depicted as important here were the Syrians and the Nigerians. No Canadians (or anyone else) need apply. I found that insulting and counterproductive, because the essence of the story was supposed to be about cooperation and collaboration. How could this be if the team was exclusively Nigerian and Syrian?

So while I wish the author all the best, I cannot recommend this as a worthy read. The story didn't feel like a story. it felt like notes for a story or at best a rough draft.

Soccerland by Beth Choat

Rating: WARTY!

I got to page 44 of this and gave up because it was so badly written, and so trite and predictable.

Middle-grader Flora Dupre gets a chance to try out for the Under-15 USA Girls’ Soccer Team. She's the best player in her school, but her school is small. On her way to the flight for the trip to the academy, and before we've even seen her put one boot to one ball, she predictably meets a cute boy and that's when I ditched this book because quite clearly the author's focus here is on pairing-off the girl, not on having her play soccer.

I am so sick to death of every girl's story demanding that they can't stand on their own two feet and need a boy to validate them. The book was supposed to be about a girl's soccer dreams, not wet dreams. It's written by a female sports reporter, but even this could not overcome the sheep-herding instinct of female authors who are owned by Big Publishing™ umbrella to insist a girl isn't complete without a boy, to insist she can't be as healthily-obsessed about a sport as a boy can be, to insist that she's lacking something and needs this guy for a shoulder to cry on when the inevitable, predictable set-back comes. This stinks. Read my Seasoning if you really want a book about a girl who plays sports and needs no outside validation form anyone. That's why I wrote it.

Keeping Score by Linda Sue Park

Rating: WARTY!

I liked Linda Sue Park's The Kite Fighters which I positively reviewed back in February 2015, but I cannot say the same for this one. If you are a fanatical, dyed-in-the-wool, psychotically passionate baseball fan, and you like middle-grade novels, then this might be the perfect entertainment vehicle for you, but for me, quite frankly, I'd have rather spent the time watching the little dot fade in the center of one of those old cathode ray tube TVs when you turn it off, than have endured this.

I had thought it might be quirky, or funny, or give an endearingly-skewed take on baseball from a young girl's PoV, but it offered quite literally none of that. Instead, it offered nothing but endless discussion of baseball players, and baseball games, and baseball stats. It was all baseball all the time and it was not as boring as hell - it was far more boring than all hell. Wporse than this, it was trite as all hell with the pathetic little story tacked on the end about some wartime tragedy. I mean seriously? Pathetic. I'm also done with Linda Sue Park. I can't voluntarily read any more stories written by an author who would stoop to writing such trashy pablum as this, I really can't. Stick a frigging Newbery in it. It's done.

Level The Playing Field by Kristina Rutherford

Rating: WARTY!

Note that this was an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher. Note also that this is going to be a lot longer review than I usually give to a book of this short length, because this is an important topic and I don't think it was covered adequately or ironically, equitably here!

The overall impression I had of this book was not that of a reasoned and cogent argument, or of anything that went into any depth. It felt much more like a rant, and as such it failed to make a case. This is the kind of subject which all too often becomes emotional, but that serves no purpose in trying to get a the roots of a discrepancy like this, to properly understand the issues, and to determine how best to set them right - or even if they can be set right.

What disappointed me most of all was that the author seemed unable to recognize the issues even when she described them. For instance, I read:

Every PGA Tour event is televised and some tournaments draw more than 10 million viewers. Only select LPGA Tour events are televised, and even major tournaments draw fewer than 1 million viewers.

I don't get her point here. It seems to me that she's elucidated the problem perfectly: the viewership of the female tournament is one tenth that of the male tournament, meaning that the advertisers are not going to show-up in droves, meaning the money is going to be significantly less, meaning that the winner's purse is going to be dramatically reduced. The the root of the discrepancy, and therefore the problem to be resolved here is why the viewership is so much less, but the author evidently wasn't interested in pursuing this question, preferring instead to wave a hand at media coverage and mark it down as explained. Well, they had media coverage here, but the viewership was far less. Why is the author not asking why that's the case? I'll talk more about this later.

On the one hand the book makes some good arguments for equity in how women are treated when it comes to sports and it definitely highlights the discrepancy between how male and female athletes are viewed (and paid), but on the other hand it came across as rather whiny and preachy, and it seemed far more focused on money and celebrity than ever it was in trying to understand why there's such a massive discrepancy between how athletes of each gender (regardless of whether they're celebrities or not) are viewed.

The author never did distinguish between equality in how athletes are treated, and equality in how athletes garner for themselves a fan base. You can legislate equality, as the US did when Democrat Senator Birch Bayh introduced what became known as Title IX in June 1972 (a year before Roe v. Wade made huge strides in another direction related tomember of Congressr who co-authored it, but it's most commonly referred to as Title IX. Patsy Mink was the first Asian American woman elected to Congress

At the beginning of this book we're asked, of two basketball stars, "Why aren't athletes like LeBron and Maya valued and recognized equally for their talent?" There are reasons for that which we'll go into shortly, and I would have been much more impressed had the book gone after real answers like this instead of the route it took. I would have been more impressed still had it approached the subject as fairly as it expects male and female athletes to be treated! The only 'solution' on offer here seemed to be that if women are given the same media exposure as men, then everything will magically balance-out, but nothing was put forward to support this claim, and frankly I have a hard time seeing that happening for a variety of reasons, and especially not in the US.

The first issue is the question of whether sports really represents the same kind of workplace that other occupations, say in the medical profession or in businesses not tied to professional sports offer. Frankly it doesn't. No one in their right mind would argue that two people, regardless of gender, who were doing the same job to the same degree of skill should get equal treatment including pay, in any ordinary endeavor, but the question of how you resolve whether two people are doing the same job in sports went totally unexamined. There were some random potshots taken at it, but nothing substantial.

Instead, we were treated to a distinctly monocular view: that of men v. women, without any attempt to look at the issue using any other lens. In particular, the fact that sports is one occupation which is conducted in the full glare of media, and with huge audiences in attendance and dramatic financial considerations in play wasn't addressed at all. This is one reason why, at the risk of a pun, it's a different ball game when compared with other occupations.

The book opens with a mention of several female athletes, including Danica Patrick, a NASCAR driver, who is gushingly described as "the most successful female race car driver in history" yet this driver has never won a race on US soil, and as of this writing has had only a single win to my knowledge. So how is her 'success' being calculated? By the fact that she earned thirteen million dollars last year? What does that have to do with being an athlete per se, or with being successful at her chosen sport? Nothing! It pretty much has to do with her having a monopoly in being a high-profile female on one hand, and her not being a complete disaster at what she does on the other.

While I would not deny Danica Patrick, or anyone else the success she's had, however it's measured, I would balk at trying to use this as an argument for equality and the author strangely seems to agree with this because whenever she talks about other female athletes, none of those are championed as successful for having no wins! On the contrary, they're put on a pedestal as being very successful in terms of winning things.

So we immediately have a disconnect in what constitutes success, which then means we have a problem in determining how that success should be rewarded. Do we value a high earner who is not successful at least insofar as garnering wins goes, or do we value success in terms of wins even when remuneration is poor? What's the goal here?! It cannot be the double standard the author seems to have set up. This is important.

I also have to wonder why this book doesn't reference other people who are sports professionals, but who do not earn the big bucks. There are thousands of people in sports, men and women, and only the so-called top-tier ones get the big bucks. Most of the others are entirely unpaid or only part-timers, or full-time professionals earning only the lowest level of financial remuneration for athletes in their field.

Admittedly this can be significant pay, and much higher than most of us can hope for, but I think it would have served a useful purpose to ask why they - both men and women - are not as highly paid as the ones featured in the book, and to ask: does the reason for their inequality offer any clues to the reason for the inequality between men and women - and I'm not talking in terms of performance. This is sports, remember, and individual performance is only one factor - and a relatively small one as it happens, because this isn't your regular everyday occupation, especially not in team sports.

The natural response to what I've said here might be that this book was talking only about high achievers, matching high-achieving males with similar females, but if we apply the 'logic' employed here, but in this direction, can we argue that those people, too, would magically get pay raises and achieve equality if only they could get the same media exposure? You really can't, so I'm wondering how it is that we think increased exposure alone would magically improve women's lot in sports?

If you think I'm trying to make an argument here that female sports professionals are really only lower-tier, or poorer-grade, or second-rate performers, then you're misunderstanding. The argument I am making here is that it's really not as simple or as straight-forward as this author seems to be trying to argue. You can't make a case for equal pay without supporting it, just as you can't make a case for those lower-tier athletes (of any gender) to be on par with the top-tier athletes without supporting that in some way, too.

You can't argue that it has to be done purely from a bald claim that person B ought really to be remunerated at the same level as person A, regardless. You have to ask what is being contributed, because professional sports is about exposure and audiences, not just about personal performance. This is an aspect of the endeavor which the book doesn't explore. Yes, it complains about poor exposure for female athletes, but it doesn't offer any suggestions or real examination of root causes! It merely blames the media and leaves it at that.

The only argument the author seems to be able to make is along the lines of "Hey! Fair's fair!" but the way this system works, and has worked for far too long, really has nothing to do with how well a given athlete performs. The most widely-followed sports really aren't about that, notwithstanding all of the individual achievement awards and post-game MVP appellations. It's about blind team solidarity, sheep-like (or perhaps more accurately, wolf-like) adherence to pack mentality, and in-your-face aggression towards every team and every supporter who isn't "us". Individual players have no part to play in that aspect of team 'sports' especially given that at some point the individual will move on or retire, while the team continues on largely unaffected by the loss of any one individual.

It's not that women can't give attitude or be aggressive, or assertive as over-hyped TV cameras love. They can. It's just that women in general are not as overt as men are in this regard and this applies whether the male or female in question is a player or a spectator. Women are not as combative (that's not to be read as 'not as competitive', which would be a huge lie) as men, and while this is perfectly fine - in fact, I personally prefer it - it doesn't play well given the juvenile frat-boy sports mentality which is rife in today's male-soaked sports media, where it's entirely given over to a combative attitude.

The mentality is 'destroy or be destroyed', 'win at all costs', losers are useless, and so on. The Queen song, We Are the Champions sums it up: "We are the champions! No time for losers 'cause we are the champions of the world!" This is how it's seen. The US football Super Bowl winners are hailed as champions of the world even though no other nations competed!

Again, it's a winner takes all mentality, and it has nothing to do with how well individual athletes perform per se. It's that very psychosis: aggression, combativeness, posing, strutting, in-your-face rudeness, and asinine attitude, which completely turns me off sports, but it is this which appeals to the cave-man mentality that far too many team sports and media outlets seem dedicated to embracing, promoting, and perpetuating. There is no more room for equity and fairness here that there was in the Roman Colosseum.

Before we go any further let's be clear that there are inequalities. According to the Women's Sports Foundation:

• Female students comprise 57% of student populations, but female athletes received only 43% of participation opportunities at NCAA schools.
• Male athletes get 55% of NCAA college athletic scholarship dollars. Guess how much women then get!
• Women's teams receive only 40% of college sport operating dollars and 36% of college athletic team recruitment spending.
• Median head coaches' salaries at NCAA Division I-FBS schools are $3,430,000 for men's teams and $1,172,400 for women's teams.

These telling stats are not ones you'll read in this book, because the book isn't about making that kind of a case. It's all about individuals, and I think that approach was a mistake. I think that very approach played into the media status quo rather than challenged it, which is what is actually needed here. There is a real problem, almost half a century on, in Title IX providing true equality for females in sports. This is a fact, but whether, if there were true and complete equality, this would translate into the same thing at the professional and media level, is another issue entirely. Given the result of over forty years of Title IX, the answer seems to be that it would not make enough of a difference.

The problem with the stats just quoted is that all we get is the bald fact of inequality. There's no exploration of why it's so or why it's being allowed to perpetuate and exacerbate in the professional world. This disparity is nowhere more pronounced than in professional soccer as is highlighted in Newsweek. The US women's team has won three world cups whereas the men's team has never advanced beyond the quarter-finals, yet male players routinely "earn" three times what female players do! To earn their relatively meager compensation, the women must win all twenty of the season games whereas the men could lose all twenty and still get full pay. Is this fair? Not even close. This is exactly the disparity that Title IX sought to set right, so how is it that it fails so badly when these athletes actually get to the professional level?

On this score (at the risk of another pun!) I was sorry to see some sleight-of-hand in this author's reporting. Consider this statement regarding remuneration in the National Women's Soccer League: "The average salary in the U.S. based NWSL is between $6,000 and $30,000 for a six-month season. A top-tier player on the men's pro side makes more than the high-end of that average - in a single week" Note how we went from an "average" to a top-tier performer? The average isn't even an average, it's a range. Is the actual average halfway between the two values? How does that compare with the men's average? We're not told, but comparing an "average" to a top-tier man's pay isn't comparing apples to apples. That said, the two would still be discrepant, but when the numbers are twisted and mismatched like that, it's really hard to get a good picture. We can't begin to figure out how to narrow a gap when we don't even get to know what the gap is or why it really exists!

One assertion from the author, referencing what someone else has said on the topic, is that "the key to closing this gap is simple: People just need to see us play. When increased exposure leads to interest from advertisers, the amount of money involved can rise pretty quickly," but this is not borne-out by experience. According to Newsweek, the Women's World Cup final of 2015 was the most watched soccer match - male or female - ever in the US, but this garnered nothing for women's sports, not even for women's soccer in the year that followed.

It's been almost twenty years since the US women's team won the World Cup soccer final in front of a sold-out Rose Bowl holding some 90,000 fans. It was a stunning game every bit the equal of a men's game - in truth leagues better than a men's game. The US men's soccer team has never done this! Whenever there's such a win, and there have been three, it's all "we're world class" and "women's sports are on the upsurge," but the day after it's always "ho-hum! What's next?" You cannot blame female athletes for asking "What do we have to do to get recognition? You cannot blame the US Olympic women who carried home 61 medals to the men's 55 from Rio for asking the same question. The author apparently isn't interested in asking this kind of question or pursuing it as far as it needs to go.

There are important aspects to these discrepancies which the author doesn't touch upon too, and which in fact relate directly to her calling an unfair play on pay. Look at US basketball, for example: while fifty or so top NBA players earn more than the entire WNBA teams roster combined, the NBA brings in five billion dollars, whereas the Women's National Basketball Association is lucky to break even. This is a question which ought to have been explored, but was not. Why does the WNBA fare so poorly? Is it because the media is shunning it, or because it simply doesn't attract as many fans and global sponsorship as the men's games do, and if that's the case, then why is that so? The author seems content to blame media bias, offer no support for the claim, and leave it at that.

We'll get back to that in a second, but let's take a moment and ask why the author never addresses the fact of women being segregated in sports as they are in no other profession, not even in the military these days. She simply accepts this segregation as a given, and I have to wonder why that inequality isn't addressed. If the leagues were white players on one side and black players on the other, then I'm sure she would have found that worth questioning, so why no questions about gender segregation? The black basketball league would then be the one making the big bucks and the white league would be in the position the women's league is, more than likely, in terms of garnering coverage! It's not an inapt comparison!

I further have to wonder if this segregation is part of the problem: if women, instead of playing in the WNBA, played in the NBA, how would they fare? This isn't to try and set up an argument for saying that women can't compete on equal terms and therefore shouldn't get equal treatment. Women have proven repeatedly that they can compete on equal terms. This is to point out that this book really doesn't delve very deep. It makes a superficial argument that everything ought to be equal, but it never makes a case for why, and it never wonders whether this particular aspect also ought to be equal and if so, would it improve matters? It avoids that altogether. It also avoids dress code, which we shall look at shortly.

Back to the segregation. It's a fact the women tend to be smaller and less muscular than men, but is this a problem? Maybe. Women would be typically shorter and lighter than the men they played against were the basketball leagues to be combined. In the NBA, the average height is six feet eight inches, whereas the average height in the WNBA is six feet. Would this be a disadvantage given that half the NBA players are necessarily six feet or less, and basketball is in theory at least, a non-contact sport? Would the advantage that a tall woman has among less tall-women in her league translate to poor performance if she became a medium-sized person among many taller persons in a male league? It's an interesting question, but it went unexplored and ignoring this made the author's case feel more like special pleading than it did a call for fair play.

Dd you know that the ball is also different between the male and female game in basketball? It's slightly smaller and lighter. Why is that and why does the author not address it? Why do female basketball players use a smaller ball while female soccer players do not? There's no answer because the author didn't ask the question. These differences in equipment translate across many other sports - the women's javelin and the women's discus are both smaller and lighter than the men's, the shot is lighter in the shotput, LPGA courses are shorter than PGA courses, and so on. In basketball, while women shoot free throws on par with men, their 3 pointers from the field average lower even in their own league. So what does equality mean? What does parity have to hinge upon? Again, we get not a word on this from the author who seems to be arguing for parity in pay but not in anything else.

As a Washington Post article puts it,

As Alice Dreger, professor of clinical medical humanities and bioethics in the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University, told me: "The reason we have females separated in sports is because in many sports, the best female athletes can't compete with the best male athletes. And everybody knows that, but nobody wants to say it. Females are structured like a disabled class for all sorts of, I think, good reasons."

This is something else the author did not explore in this book. Is the problem that simple or is there more to it? She didn't ask. According to the NY times, "There has yet to be a financially viable women's mainstream sports league in the United States." The author would undoubtedly argue that this is because of poor media coverage, but although she argues that, she fails to support any such argument.

And take a look at the crowd in the image accompanying the article. That says it all right there. Women are not sports attenders in general - not on the level at which men are - or even at which women are when it comes to men's games. The attendance by gender at all of the major sports in the US shows males turning up at literally twice the rate of female attendees. We read a lot in this book about women who play the sports, but nothing about those who attend and thereby help pay the salaries of the participants.

It bothers me that the author doesn't explore these aspects as a reason for disparity and inequality, asking why the attendance is so poor. Advertisers are not going to want to pay much to have an ad at a game with seven thousand people when they can have one at a game which will be seen by twice that number of people (not even including the viewers at home), and without extra advertising revenue, there's less cash to pay the players. The author doesn't explore, either, whether men really ought to get more if they play eighty games in a basketball season, which is twice what female players play.

There's an interesting, and sad, article here about this disparity in attendance related to Syracuse University's performance in the 2016 basketball season (and on the topic of inequality do compare the men's basketball page for Syracuse in Wikipedia with the women's! This makes a better argument about inequality than this book did, in my opinion!). Women had a far better season than the men (losing in the final whereas the men lost in the quarterfinals) yet their attendance was averaging less than a thousand, while the men's was almost twenty-two times as high.

Keep in mind that roughly thirty percent of the attendance at the men's games - that would be 6,000 to 7,000 people - was women. Where were these women when it came to games played by their own gender? ESPN is on record as saying that men accounted for 66% of its WNBA audience in 2013. Where were the women? Why are they viewing women's games at roughly the same percentage as they're viewing men's games? Why are so few men viewing women's games?

None of this is explored in the book, yet all of it is relevant to the case the author thought she was making. Is the lack of interest in women's sports not just from the media and from men, but also from women themselves? Apparently so, and this is one thing Title IX cannot legislate. They can compel equal opportunity (to more or less success as we've seen), but they cannot compel fans and supporters into existence or into attendance.

There are sports where women compete on perfectly equal terms with men, but where women are highly underrepresented. The author never explored this. For example, Danica Patrick has extremely high visibility and is highly rewarded for racing in NASCAR, but as mentioned, she has never won a race (as of this writing) on US soil, and has had only one win elsewhere. The author mentions Danica Patrick but never explores the details. Patrick earned about thirteen million in 2015, whereas Dale Earnhardt earned almost twice that, with no wins! Kyle Busch, who won at least five races earned less than Patrick did! There is no justice or parity anywhere in this particular story, yet no one seems to complain about that!

What do TV advertisers advertise at women's games? At men's games it seems to be cars, beer, power tools, and financial and retirement opportunities. What do advertisers want to offer to women, and do they have the same advertising budget to offer it with that the car and beer advertisers do? Again, this is unexplored, but it does have a bearing on the subject. More to the point is what happens in comparable situations.

For example, a new TV show is very much like a sports event. Because of the intensely capitalistic system the USA operates in, the show needs viewers to survive. If viewership goes down, the show is cancelled. We've lost a lot of quality shows because of this, while crappy so-called "reality' shows thrive. Why? Because this is what idiots watch on the idiot's lantern. It's that simple. Quality often fails were the lowest common denominator wins every time, and this is the issue: it all comes down to what makes money for the media. It has nothing to do with parity or equality, fairness or gender rights. If the female sports events don't attract viewers and sustain the attraction beyond world cup events, then advertisers are not going to be interested and the media is not going to cover them, yet this author doesn't ask why attendance is so poor. She just blames the media for it.

Let's talk about equality some more - in this case, equality of dress. Has anyone given any thought to how male athletes dress as compared to female ones? Probably not, but I think it's part of the problem. Take a look at your average male track athlete in the last Olympics and note how they dress for the track. On men, the shorts may be tight or loose fitting, and the shirt may be sleeveless or not, but they are wearing a shirt and shorts. Now take a look at the women who are, for all practical purposes, dressed in bikinis. Shotput? The same. Javelin? The same. Why is that? For beach volleyball, they wear even less! The men don't though. Why is that?

Consider this: swimming is the only event I can think of in the Olympics in which men wear less than women. Maybe it is literally for all practical purposes that women dress so skimpily, but if that's the case, then why are men not emulating them in terms of wearing an abbreviated top and bikini shorts? Now look at soccer or basketball. What do women wear? Very much the same as men do! Why is that? It seems to me that if you want to be taken seriously as an athlete, you might want to reconsider wearing bikinis for every event! Is this a valid argument? We don't know, because once again, this is a highly visible aspect to sports which this author completely ignores.

I didn't like this author's overall attitude either, quite frankly! At one point, she says, "But it's female athletes who most consistently give us representations of women who embody qualities like toughness and power and tenacity." How disrespectful is that to women who work in other professions? Are female firefighters not tough? Are female law enforcement disempowered? Are female soldiers, sailors, air personnel, and the Coast Guard lacking tenacity? Are female industry leaders powerless? Are teachers not tenacious? Are female nurses not tough?! The single-minded focus on athletes here, notwithstanding this was the main purpose of the book, was an insult to women working in other fields.

In conclusion, this book felt far more like a cult of personality than an honest exploration on gender inequity in sports. The bottom line, though would seem to be popularity: does the media really shun women's sports or does the media simply show what's most popular because it's from this that advertising revenue will derive, regardless of what gender is involved in the sport?

This question should have been one to explore, but we don't get that here: who attends? Who pays to watch? Is the female game perceived, by those who pay the entrance fees, just as worthy of admission price as the men's game is? As reported in late 2016, "The WNBA registered its highest attendance (1,561,530) since 2011 and the highest average attendance (7,655). For comparison, the average attendance at NBA games is over twice that, at around 17,000.

Are people simply voting with their feet not for which gender is worth supporting, but for which game is worth viewing with their limited budget? Which has the best atmosphere? Which one their friends will be going to and talking about the next day? Maybe it's just that simple, maybe it isn't, but we won't know the answer to that from reading this book, and I cannot recommend it because not only does it not achieve what it claims to aim at, it doesn't even pursue what it claims to be chasing! If you want to write a book about leveling the playing field, you need to be on the level in what you write.

The Secret at Haney Field by RM Clark

Title: The Secret at Haney Field
Author: RM Clark
Publisher: MB Publishing
Rating: WORTHY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often reward aplenty!

What could be more appropriate in the depths of winter than a book about baseball?! This is actually the first fiction I've ever read that features baseball at its core. For those who need it, it features a nice glossary at the beginning, which was actually useful to me. I'm not a huge sports fan! And a huge sports fan might be what you have to be to properly enjoy this: note that it's really heavy into baseball terminology and trivia.

That said, I can tell you that I really liked the story and consider it a worthy read. It was inventive, atmospheric, well-written, and proves single-handedly that it's possible to write a first person PoV novel that's not vomit-inducing! Kudos for that!

April O'Day is obsessed with baseball. Unhealthily so, I'd say, but let's let that slide right on by. She's also a bit too much of a Mary Sue, but other than that, she's smart, helpful, confident, adventurous, and she has integrity and guts. That's not bad at all for a female protagonist, and a heck of a lot better than you get in your typical YA novel. Maybe that's because this is middle-grade and not YA? Middle grade females seem to have a heck of a lot more going for them than ever do females in YA. Hey, why is that?

April's summer thrill is that she gets to be bat-girl(!) for a week at the local minor league team - the Harpoons (a suitably phallic name for a sports team, let's face it). She does so well that she is allowed to stay on after her volunteer week is over. She proves her worth not just by doing her assigned job well, but also by giving tips to the players on their running, their swinging, and their throwing, and the team starts doing really well.

So far, so good, but one night when she's delayed leaving, and when the stadium lights go off, April thinks she sees shadows running bases - not real people, but transparent shadows. Maybe it's just her imagination. But she keeps seeing them. Her friend Darren sees them. So, too, does the owner, Mr Haney, who takes a shine to April and invites her to his owner's box. After a discussion, he authorizes her to find out all she can about the shadows.

It's pretty obvious what they are, but maybe middle-graders will take longer to figure out out. What's not so obvious is why they're haunting Haney Field. Are they connected with that large object which Haney keeps hidden away under the stadium? Are they connected with names missing from a plaque? Why does Haney turn hostile when he learns what those names are? Are they connected with events from seventy years ago? And why are they haunting Haney's field?

I really liked this story, despite some minor irritations. It told a good tale and although it was a bit too sugary, it had a good ending. I'm sure middle-graders will love it.