Age Level: 9 and up | Grade Level: 4 and up | Series: Boy/Girl Battle
Play ball! That’s what the sixth-grade Buckman Badgers baseball team plans on doing. Eddie Malloy and Jake Hatford hope to lead their team to the championship game the last Saturday in May. But due to a mix-up, Mrs. Hatford has to run a yard sale for the Women’s Auxiliary of the Buckman Fire Department the very same day in their very own yard! Not wanting to miss out on the game, the family elects the only nonbaseball fan in the family, Wally, to stay home and help watch over the sale tables until they return. Wally’s ticked off. On top of that, Caroline Malloy has written and will perform a play for a school project and has roped Wally into costarring with her. Let Caroline think she’s so smart. Wally has his own reason for being in the play. It looks like the Hatfords could be totally humiliated after the girls stumble upon an embarrassing item from the boys’ past. Leave it to Wally’s secret plan to turn the tables on the girls’ scheme and prove who’s really in control! Boys rule!
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Grade 3-6-In the ninth of this series, the Hatford boys and the Malloy girls spend more time cooperating than fighting. Eddie and Jake both play for the Buckman Badgers in the sixth-grade baseball championship; after she chokes in the first game, he decides to practice with her for the good of the team. Meanwhile the community yard sale Mrs. Hatford has volunteered to host falls on the same day as their playoff game. She enlists a reluctant Wally to take over until she returns, and Caroline sees helping him as an opportunity to talk him into acting with her in a play she's writing for their fourth-grade English class. When the girls find a photo album full of humiliating pictures of the boys, Caroline blackmails Wally to keep his word about being the husband in her play. A subplot about two relatives of Amelia Bloomer trying to steal a framed picture from Wally's house before the sale opens provides suspense but strains credulity. It turns out the frame hides her original bloomers. Still, this is a fast-paced read, and fans of the series will welcome it. It should also interest baseball fans, especially girls, since there is plenty of action on the field. Tina Zubak, Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, PA Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
I guess I've been writing for about as long as I can remember. Telling stories, anyway, if not writing them down. I had my first short story published when I was sixteen, and wrote stories to help put myself through college, planning to become a clinical psychologist. By the time I graduated with a BA degree, however, I decided that writing was really my first love, so I gave up plans for graduate school and began writing full time.
I'm not happy unless I spend some time writing every day. It's as though pressure builds up inside me, and writing even a little helps to release it. On a hard-writing day, I write about six hours. Tending to other writing business, answering mail, and just thinking about a book takes another four hours. I spend from three months to a year on a children's book, depending on how well I know the characters before I begin and how much research I need to do. A novel for adults, because it's longer, takes a year or more. When my work is going well, I wake early in the mornings, hoping it's time to get up. When the writing is hard and the words are flat, I'm not very pleasant to be around.
Getting an idea for a book is the easy part. Keeping other ideas away while I'm working on one story is what's difficult. My books are based on things that have happened to me, things I have heard or read about, all mixed up with imaginings. The best part about writing is the moment a character comes alive on paper, or when a place that existed only in my head becomes real. There are no bands playing at this moment, no audience applauding--a very solitary time, actually--but it's what I like most. I've now had more than 120 books published, and about 2000 short stories, articles and poems.
I live in Bethesda, Maryland, with my husband, Rex, a speech pathologist, who's the first person to read my manuscripts when they're finished. Our sons, Jeff and Michael, are grown now, but along with their wives and children, we often enjoy vacations together in the mountains or at the ocean. When I'm not writing, I like to hike, swim, play the piano and attend the theater.
I'm lucky to have my family, because they have contributed a great deal to my books. But I'm also lucky to have the troop of noisy, chattering characters who travel with me inside my head. As long as they are poking, prodding, demanding a place in a book, I have things to do and stories to tell.
Fans of Phyllis Naylor's "Boys Against The Girls" series will delight in the new Boys In Control, which continues the saga of the Hatford boys and the Malloy girls at war. Here a thwarted baseball game turns into another competition between boys in girls in this story of war and underlying friendships, with more than a dash of humor.
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THIS IS IT THE 9TH BOOK IN THE SERIES OF THE HATFORDS AGAINST THE MALLOYS.I JUST KNOW YOU'LL ENJOY IT BECAUSE AS YOU KNOW JAKE AND EDDIE ARE NOW ON THE SAME BASEBALL TEAM THE BUCKMAN BADGERS.WITH ALL OF THE TRICKS THAT HAD ALREADY BEEN PLAYED THE ONLY, THE MOST HUMILIATING ONE IS BEING PLAYED NOW BY THE MALLOY SISTERS.WHILE THE BAKE SALE THAT MRS.HATFORD SIGNED UP FOR IS ON THE SAME DAY THE PLAYOFFS OF THE BUCKMAN BADGERS THE HATFORD FAMILY CHOOSES ONE PERSON IN THE FAMILY WHO DOESN'T VERY MUCH ENJOY BASEBALL,TO DO THE CHORES FOR MRS.HATFORD.CAROLINE DECIDES TO STAY WITH WALLY WHEN THEY GO .BUT WHAT HAPPENS.WHO IS IN CONTROL.THE BOYS OR THE GIRLS READ BOYS IN CONTROL TO FIND OUT.THE TITLE MAY NOT MEAN ANYTHING.
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