FernFolio

New Auckland is a small town perched on the rocky coast of British Columbia. The houses and other buildings of the town are squeezed into a narrow strip of land between the mountains and the pebbled beach. The residents live with the sea at their back doors and the Rockies at the front. New Auckland is a great place to grow up in. Though life isn’t easy for its 138 inhabitants and the only way in or out of the town is by sea, the adults and children form a tight-knit community, one in which jobs such as gathering firewood to heat their houses during the winter is shared by all of the residents, both old and young.
There are nine kids living in and around New Auckland between the ages of 11 and and 14, and they share a dream. They want to go on a school trip to Vancouver, a city none of them has ever visited. None of them but Thumb, the son of the school principal. It is Thumb who comes up with a plan to get himself and his friends to Vancouver. They will put together a baseball team, challenge the other communities along the coast to games, which they will win by default because none of the other communities has a baseball team, and then the school board will pay for them to travel to Vancouver for the provincial championships.
There is only two problems with this plan. The first is that none of the kids in New Auckland has ever played baseball, because the second problem is that there is no open, flat stretch of land big enough in or around the town on which to practice or play baseball. But these drawbacks don’t stop Thumb or his friends. They read books about baseball, and watch videos about baseball, and they practice pitching and catching and hitting on the beach and main street of town, putting up fishing nets to keep the balls from escaping.
Soon they are on their way to Vancouver where they travel, as Susan says excitedly, in something with wheels, spend countless hours traveling up and down the escalator, and learn to order from a menu in a restaurant. Before they know it, however, it’s time for the kids from New Auckland to play their first game. What follows has got to be one of the most hilarious sporting events ever committed to print, possibly only excelled by their second, and final game, against the top Vancouver baseball team!
See if you can keep from laughing aloud!
I am eager to find and read the first story in this series, The Thumb in the Box!
FernFolio Editor