Penny’s father is deceased, but she has daily contact with his loud, loving, and unusual Italian-American family.  It is the summer of 1953 and Penny bumps through it:  adventures with her trouble-making cousin Frankie, heart to heart talks with her eccentric Uncle Dominic (who lives in his car!), a hospital stay after she is injured, and an adjustment when her widowed mother begins dating the milkman.  Along the way Penny is trying to gain answers to how her father died.  No one will tell her.  Perhaps someone should have told Penny the old maxim “be careful what you wish for or you just might get it”. 

This books is rich.  There is much more plot and action than in Park’s Keeping Score.  I prefer this book to Park’s Keeping Score, but I like history better than sports.  Read both and see what YOU think…

A Newbery Honor book from 2007, Penny from Heaven is on the current 2009 Rebecca Caudill list for Illinois. 

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!