Meet-the-Author Recording with Jordan Sonnenblick
Curveball: The Year I Lost My Grip |
Jordan Sonnenblick introduces and shares some of the backstory for creating Curveball: The Year I Lost My Grip.
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J. Sonnenblick: Hi. This is Jordan Sonnenblick. I'm the author of "Curveball." I'm going to tell you a bit about how I came to write this book, and then I'll share an excerpt with you. Basically, it was the year after my grandfather died, and my grandfather was pretty much the hero of my childhood. I inherited a camera from him, and in learning how to use the camera that my grandfather had left me, I kind of found this metaphor for dealing with the memories of my grandfather's death, which is part of what "Curveball" is about. It's about memory and about loss. And the other piece is that my son was a middle school athlete who desperately wanted to play high school sports, and at the time, his biggest fear was, what if I get an injury and I can't ever be a high school athlete? And so "Curveball" is about both of those things. It's about a teenager who has an athletic injury and he's losing his abilities just as his grandfather is becoming senile, has Alzheimer's disease, and is losing his abilities. And it's about how this teenage boy is dealing with both of those things at once. In the excerpt I'm going to read to you, the teenager is talking with his best friend, AJ, about this girl he likes.
"So there I was, sitting on my butt, cooking in the Indian summer sun and watching my caveman buddy take about 43 million foul shots. As an added bonus, he was enlightening me with his insights about the female mind. "So then," grunt, shoot, swish, "she just invited herself over here and told you to take pictures of her?" "No," I said. '"That's not what happened at all. Mr Marsh, our photography teacher, assigned us to be partners and then." "She wants you, man." "What are you talking about? I just said the teacher assigned us to work together and then I was the one who asked her to come over." "Oh, yeah." Grunt, shoot, swish. "She totally wants you." I stood up, walked over to AJ, and knocked on the side of his head. "Are you listening to me at all? The teacher made the assignment, and then I made the invitation." He pushed me away with one hand and shot with the other. It was a complete air ball, and he said, "See? Now you made me miss. Like it's my fault you can't accept what's happening in your love life." I sat back down in disgust. "My love life?"
This Meet-the-Author Recording with Jordan Sonnenblick was exclusively created in July 2016 by TeachingBooks with thanks to Scholastic.