I was surprised as I began reading Keeping Score to find Linda Sue Park writing a book with a non-Korean main character.  Maggie (or Maggie-O as her father and his friends at the fire station call her) is from Brooklyn with an Irish mother and an Italian father.  The setting is the early 1950s (1951-1955) and, of course, Maggie is a Brooklyn Dodgers fan.  When Jim, a young new fireman down at the station, teaches Maggie how to keep score while listening to the games on the radio, her days as a baseball fan hit a new height.  Maggie likes Jim… in spite of the fact that he is a Giants fan.

Keeping Score is really about being a fan of baseball.  Parks explains this world in a way that even I, the I-could-really-care-less-about-any-sport-kinda-girl, can gain some insights into the mind and heart of a baseball fan.  Park draws on her own painful years as a Chicago Cubs fan to add the realistic angst of the “maybe next year” attitude necessary to be a fan of the early 1950s Brooklyn Dodgers. 

Maggie desperately wishes to go to a live game, but her fireman father’s phobia of crowded places prohibits it, so Maggie must content herself with listening to the games on the radio at home or at the fire station with the guys.  She annually fills a notebook scoring each season.  I am not a sports fan in any sense, but I enjoy going to occasional baseball games; but I go to watch people, eat ballpark food, and enjoy the atmosphere.  My husband is a true fan.  A die-hard Cubs fan.  Like Maggie he religiously keeps a scorecard when we attend games.  (He still has his first Cubs scorecard from when he was 8 or 9 years old!)  Who knew a YA novel could help me better understand my husband of 25 years? 

So baseball forms the main theme of the narrative, but when Jim is drafted and sent to Korea Maggie seeks to understand that conflict with the same detailed intensity with which she scores baseball games.  Maggie keeps a notebook on the origins of the war, the progress, and the lack of progress as the conflict in Korea unfolds through Jim’s letters and the newspaper accounts.  Her notebook on Korea is like keeping score… only it is no game… and there are no winners.

The quintessential advice given to writers is “write what you know”.  Linda Sue Park knows baseball and Korea.  In combining the two she has created a very credible sports book with depth and meaning.  And if I liked it…  sports fans are gonna love it!