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| Perma-Bound Edition ©2009 | -- |
| Paperback ©2009 | -- |
Baseball. Fiction.
Pitchers (Baseball). Fiction.
Sex role. Fiction.
Grief. Fiction.
Mothers and daughters. Fiction.
Friendship. Fiction.
Baseball. Juvenile fiction.
Pitchers (Baseball). Juvenile fiction.
Sex role. Juvenile fiction.
Grief. Juvenile fiction.
Mothers and daughters. Juvenile fiction.
Friendship. Juvenile fiction.
Buffalo (N.Y.). Fiction.
Buffalo (N.Y.). Juvenile fiction.
Molly thinks that girls' softball is just "baseball translated into a foreign language," so she tries out for the boys' baseball team. She can throw a wicked knuckleball, which floats and bobs like a butterfly (hence the title), and this skill, coupled with her intelligent baseball sense, earns her a spot on the team, thanks in part to a coach who is a patient and caring teacher. There is the initial expected harassment from some of her male teammates and an important game sequence during the last inning of this novel, but what transpires in between is an honest, sometimes humorous, and emotionally moving account of one girl's adjustment to the death of her baseball-loving father and her relationship with her mother, of whom Molly thinks, "I love you and all that, but right now everything about you bothers me." Throw in a friendship with her catcher that heads in the direction of romance, and this title becomes a sure winner with middle-school girls, whether they are sports fans or not.
Horn Book (Sat Aug 01 00:00:00 CDT 2009)Six months after her father's death, young knuckleballer Molly tries out for the boys' baseball team. Not everyone is encouraging, but she knows her dad would have approved. Cochrane allows Molly to deal with her emotions at her own speed and in her own way. In so doing, he creates a compassionate, perceptive, pitch-perfect portrait of grief.
Kirkus ReviewsWith tender poignancy, Cochrane gets right to the heart of young Molly's painful journey. Her father died in an accident, and her mother has withdrawn to deal with her own pain. She shared a love of baseball with her father, which seems to be her only tenuous connection to the happiness she once knew. He taught her how to throw a knuckleball, and she uses that unique skill to join the boys' baseball team. With loving encouragement from some dear friends and some leaps of faith, she comes to terms with the changes in her life. Careful to avoid pathos, the author is particularly adept at capturing just the right turn of phrase as Molly narrates her story. She sees herself as a "brave-hearted poster girl, Miss Difficulty Overcome," and as someone who "had become an island." Impeccable syntax lends authenticity to the rocky road that is middle school, baseball practices and games, and to Molly's relationships with her peers and with her mother. Lovely and memorable. (Fiction. 10-14)
Publishers Weekly (Fri Oct 06 00:00:00 CDT 2023)Cochrane (Sport) revisits the baseball diamond in this unhurried novel about a girl with a mean knuckleball (""""Molly loved watching one of her knuckleballs in flight, but what she felt was not self-admiration at all, just simple curiosity. What was this one going to do?""""). Dealing with her father's death in a car accident six months prior and her mother's subsequent zombie-like disinterest in life, Molly hopes that playing on the eighth-grade boys' baseball team will keep her connected to her dad. Molly is bolstered by her free-spirited friend, Celia (who steals every scene she's in), and Lonnie, a kindhearted, artistically inclined catcher. Cochrane offers poignant flashbacks of father-daughter bonding, realistic mother-daughter squabbling and some nail-biting moments on the pitcher's mound, but some readers may find the story's pace sluggish. Still, Cochrane's honest, quiet prose should find fans, as Molly finally pitches a winning game, earns the respect of her teammates and symbolically """"lets go"""" of her need to understand her dad's death. Ages 10-up.
School Library Journal (Sun Mar 01 00:00:00 CST 2009)Gr 5-9 In this sensitive sports novel, a thoughtful eighth grader works through the grief she feels over her father's death. In the months following his car accident, Molly's comfortable life has been turned upside down and her mother has become a stranger. Molly and her father had always been close; as they played catch together, he passed along his love of baseball and much of his philosophy of life as well. A loyal fan of lovable losers like the Chicago Cubs, he taught Molly to throw a knuckleball, a pitch that flutters like a butterfly. He told her: "You don't aim a butterfly. You release it." Molly finds comfort in her memories and decides to try out for the boys' baseball team. She meets some resistance from her teammates, but with the help of a sympathetic coach and friends, she earns a spot on the team. In Molly, Cochrane crafts an awkward yet engaging heroine whose perceptions and interactions with family, friends, and supporting characters ring true. Crisply written sports action balances the internal drama. Suggest this well-written character study to readers who enjoyed Kristi Roberts's My Thirteenth Season (Holt, 2005) and Karen Day's No Cream Puffs (Random, 2008). Marilyn Taniguchi, Beverly Hills Public Library, CA
ALA Booklist (Sun Mar 01 00:00:00 CST 2009)
Horn Book (Sat Aug 01 00:00:00 CDT 2009)
Kirkus Reviews
Publishers Weekly (Fri Oct 06 00:00:00 CDT 2023)
School Library Journal (Sun Mar 01 00:00:00 CST 2009)
Wilson's High School Catalog
Wilson's Junior High Catalog
On Monday, after band rehearsal and intramurals, when Molly got home from school, her mother was sitting at the kitchen table going through the day's mail. It was after six, daylight saving time now, and still light, thank god. Even in Buffalo, the snowiest, grayest place on earth, spring eventually came.
Her mother had changed from her work clothes into her white designer sweats, matching pants and top with padded shoulders, which made her look to Molly like a fencer--all she needed was a little red heart.
She had cable news playing low on the countertop portable, a bottle of water and a pile of catalogs in front of her. It was what her mother did after work. Her ritual unwinding. She'd page through the glossy daily stack of catalogs one by one, turning the pages mechanically, looking irritated, angry even, fierce lines on her forehead. It seemed mysterious to Molly. Was her mother mad at Eddie Bauer? At Pottery Barn and Talbots? Dissatisfied with L.L.Bean's selection of boots and raingear, with Williams-Sonoma's pots and pans? It didn't make any sense. Her mother occasionally bought stuff, blouses and sweaters usually, always the same color, teal, which was weird enough--how much teal-colored clothing do you need, really?
As far as Molly could tell, her mother almost always returned whatever she bought. The UPS guy brought packages, and her mother opened them, unpinned and unfolded and held things up, sometimes tried them on. But then she'd usually just reassemble the packages and readdress them. She drove them around in her car for a few days and eventually dropped them off at the post office. To Molly, it seemed like a lot of work. Why subject yourself to such misery? What was the point?
Molly had learned not to interrupt her. Her mother was in some distant, ticked-off, unreachable place--the Planet of Inexplicable Exasperation. Molly put down her backpack and saxophone case, grabbed an apple from the fridge, sat down, and waited. There was nothing that looked like dinner happening anywhere in the kitchen. Why bother cooking for just the two of us? her mother had gotten into the habit of asking. Sometimes, with her dad at work, they used to make dinner together, Molly and her mother. They used to wash and chop vegetables and talk and even joke a little. Molly liked it--it was like their own little cooking show. But no more, not for a long time. That show got canceled. Nowadays they mostly ordered out, subs or Chinese, pizza and wings. Molly missed her dad's cooking. He had only a handful of meals, spaghetti and stir-fry and omelets and meat loaf, that was his rotation, nothing fancy, but always tasty.
On television the square-headed security czar seemed to be changing the threat level while baseball scores crawled across the bottom of the screen. The Cubs had beaten the Pirates, 12-1, which pleased Molly, because it would have pleased her father. They were his team. He'd grown up listening to their games on the radio. The Cubs were lovable losers. They hadn't won the World Series for something like a hundred years. No matter. Her dad had always paid attention to the scores, and now, out of habit, Molly couldn't help but do the same.
"So how was your day?" her mother asked, her eyes still scanning the Sharper Image catalog in front of her--ionizing air cleaners, massage chairs, turbo-groomers.
"Fine," Molly said. Most days this was the right answer. It meant that she had negotiated another day without disaster, steered her little boat through the rocky waters of eighth grade without capsizing. She hadn't failed anything, she hadn't been given detention. In the past ten hours she'd done nothing to ruffle her mother's sense of well-being.
"What about rehearsal?" her mother asked. Sometimes she wanted more. What her English teacher called "supporting detail." She needed to "show"
Excerpted from The Girl Who Threw Butterflies by Mick Cochrane
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
For an eighth grader, Molly Williams has more than her fair share of problems. Her father has just died in a car accident, and her mother has become a withdrawn, quiet version of herself.
Molly doesn’t want to be seen as “Miss Difficulty Overcome”; she wants to make herself known to the kids at school for something other than her father’s death. So she decides to join the baseball team. The boys’ baseball team. Her father taught her how to throw a knuckleball, and Molly hopes it’s enough to impress her coaches as well as her new teammates.
Over the course of one baseball season, Molly must figure out how to redefine her relationships to things she loves, loved, and might love: her mother; her brilliant best friend, Celia; her father; her enigmatic and artistic teammate, Lonnie; and of course, baseball.
Mick Cochrane is a professor of English and the Lowery Writer-in-Residence at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York, where he lives with his wife and two sons.