Linda Sue Park

In Brooklyn in 1951, a die-hard Giants fan teaches nine-year-old Maggie, who is a "Bums" (Dodgers) fan, how to use a technique to keep score of a baseball game which creates a special friendship between them.

Keeping Score

Jeni Enjaian

While I did not dislike this book, I did not really like it either, hence the 3 star rating.
Park reliably crafts a solid narrative and develops her characters fairly well with slow moving plots. This plot, however, took far too long to unfold. One could make the argument for a lack of plot in most of the book. Additionally, Maggie, the protagonist, developed incredibly slowly even though the book takes place over the course of several years, and at the end still seems a bit like the 12 year old she was at the start of the book. 
While I love baseball and statistics, the friendship that developed between Maggie and Jim felt odd to me, slightly uncomfortable with Jim being a grown man who Maggie has no real ties to other than the fact that he works at her father's old firehouse. Nothing in Park's writing suggests anything untoward, I just have major issues with the concept of this friendship. Also, Maggie's fixation, which drives a lot of the plot that exists also bothered me. Perhaps structured a bit differently, I would have enjoyed this book more.

Keeping Score

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