Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

Here’s the deal, folks. I have sick/grieving kids home from school today and one of them is napping in the living room, which eliminates that room as an area to work on (as well as the kitchen, since most kitchen jobs are noisy). My morning project, therefore, is to start working through the backlog of papers and books at my computer that are waiting to be dealt with, and if I’m going to do that, I’ve got to review a couple of the books there so that they can leave the area. I’m planning on talking about the funeral and fall break during tomorrow’s regular post, because that matters more in the long run; today, however, is about immediate cleanup, and so you have this review. (Also at least one other, I hope. We’ll see.)

Elana K. Arnold’s Bat and the Case of the Yips is the 5th book in her Bat series, and it begins with an interesting development–Bat’s dad wants him to try baseball so badly that he tells Bat that if he does, he can start bringing Thor with him on every-other-weekends. Bat wants that enough to agree, and so he joins the team his dad is coaching. He soon hatches a plan, however, to start playing so badly that the team won’t want him, but his dad will still be bound to his end of the bargain. This goes…about as well as you’d expect. Not only is Bat miserable at the lying-without-words, but his friend Israel is obviously upset by his behavior. Bat learns some valuable lessons as the situation gets sorted out; what’s more, his dad has been learning some things about himself as well. This makes for a satisfying ending.

My one real complaint about the book is the same complaint I had about the last one; I want the adults in Bat’s life to try a bit more to explain the feelings of other people to him. I recognize that explaining feelings to a boy on the spectrum can be complicated, yes, but if it wouldn’t work, I want Arnold to spend a bit more time showing that to me. Too many of those adults seem to stop just short of a full explanation that draws parallels between Bat’s feelings and those of the others in his life, sighing and giving up instead. If those explanations are going to fail, well–I want to SEE them fail. Overall, however, Case of the Yips is a nice addition to the series.