FIELDS APART

A mother and daughter keep secrets from one another in this World War II–era story.

Being a lefty with a devastating submarine delivery, 14-year-old Wisconsinite Millie Bauer is not only good enough on the mound to play with the boys in sandlot games, but has caught the eye of the local high school’s baseball coach. Her love of the game is tempered, though, when she intercepts a crushing telegram announcing that her beloved big brother George has gone MIA in Italy—news that she keeps from her hardworking, recently widowed mother, Helen. This becomes easier when, sometime later, Helen suddenly begins spending so much of her free time volunteering to work with wounded soldiers down at the Red Cross facility that the two seldom see one another. Helen, it turns out, is concealing something too…but Kelly drops in enough clues that alert readers shouldn’t be too surprised by the denouement. Along with folding in plenty of baseball talk and action, the author adds enough details about daily life to give the tale a clear sense of the period. He also leads his talented young pitcher all the way to a tryout with the Minneapolis Millerettes of the All-American Girls League, though that subplot’s sudden ending makes this less a baseball story than one about small-town wartime life and the anxieties of having a loved one fighting overseas.

A well-developed story of navigating the ups and downs of life on the homefront.