From: Levine, Arthur <ALevine>
Date: Thu, 7 Jan 1999 10:54:43 -0500

I wonder if the fact of individual titles being more popular with sports-minded kids has to do with the strength as FICTION of those individual titles (I would add Spinelli's CRASH to the list, as well as Rich Wallace's recent novels). Maybe what this says is that kids who like sports are happy to have sports be a part of the novels they read, as long as the sport is not simply a marketing "hook" but actually an integral and organic part of the characters and settings of the works in question.
     That's certainly how it works for me as a reader. I love tennis, love playing tennis, and love reading about it too. I scour newspapers first for tennis scores and articles, and love reading nonfiction tennis "stories" (as a kid some of my first heroes were Althea Gibson, Pancho Gonzales and Arthur Ashe, and I read everything I could about them). I know I would enjoy a novel set in the tennis world, but it would have to be successful as a NOVEL first and foremost. Anne Lamott's CROOKED LITTLE HEART comes to mind...
     What I'm saying about myself, and about young readers today is that I think it doesn't make sense for sports and novels to be mutually exclusive categories. Perhaps what has sunk the less successful sports fiction is that publishers and authors have paid too much attention to the "sport" part and not to the emotional underpinnings that would make the "fiction" part satisfying.
Received on Thu 07 Jan 1999 09:54:43 AM CST