Greg’s mom calls a family meeting to determine what to do with their share, proposing home improvements and then overruling the family’s cartoonish wish lists and instead pushing for an addition to the kitchen. When Great Aunt Reba dies, she leaves some money to the family. The Heffley family’s house undergoes a disastrous attempt at home improvement.

This energetic, engaging, complex novel will appeal to readers whether or not they are fans of baseball. Notably, her coach is a White woman in a same-gender marriage. Shenice’s story is dripping with images of positive Black representation without shying away from the historical realities of her family playing baseball in the American South and how it affects her present as she attempts to make history herself. Following Clean Getaway (2020), Stone returns with another middle-grade novel that discusses race at a level her readers will understand but without condescension. Shenice is compelled to seek answers, but the more she focuses on the past, the more she puts her future at risk. He tells her the story of her great-grandfather’s rise from the Negro Leagues to the majors and how racial prejudice played a part in his being framed for the theft of a famous baseball glove. After a devastating loss, her father shows her memorabilia from her family’s baseball lineage, which spurs a trip to visit her great-uncle Jack. Twelve-year-old Shenice “Lightning” Lockwood has baseball in her veins and plans to lead her all-Black fast-pitch softball team (a first in the Dixie Youth Softball Association), the Fulton Firebirds, to victory at the district championship. A girl with a family baseball legacy that’s a weight on her shoulders attempts to clear the name of her great-grandfather and win a historic title for her team.

Fast pitch nic stone