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For an eighth grader, Molly Williams has more than her fair share of problems. Her father has just died in a car accident, and her mother has become a withdrawn, quiet version of herself.
Molly doesn’t want to be seen as “Miss Difficulty Overcome”; she wants to make herself known to the kids at school for something other than her father’s death. So she decides to join the baseball team. The boys’ baseball team. Her father taught her how to throw a knuckleball, and Molly hopes it’s enough to impress her coaches as well as her new teammates.
Over the course of one baseball season, Molly must figure out how to redefine her relationships to things she loves, loved, and might love: her mother; her brilliant best friend, Celia; her father; her enigmatic and artistic teammate, Lonnie; and of course, baseball.
Mick Cochrane is a professor of English and the Lowery Writer-in-Residence at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York, where he lives with his wife and two sons.
Cochrane (Sport) revisits the baseball diamond in this unhurried novel about a girl with a mean knuckleball ("Molly loved watching one of her knuckleballs in flight, but what she felt was not self-admiration at all, just simple curiosity. What was this one going to do?"). Dealing with her father's death in a car accident six months prior and her mother's subsequent zombie-like disinterest in life, Molly hopes that playing on the eighth-grade boys' baseball team will keep her connected to her dad. Molly is bolstered by her free-spirited friend, Celia (who steals every scene she's in), and Lonnie, a kindhearted, artistically inclined catcher. Cochrane offers poignant flashbacks of father-daughter bonding, realistic mother-daughter squabbling and some nail-biting moments on the pitcher's mound, but some readers may find the story's pace sluggish. Still, Cochrane's honest, quiet prose should find fans, as Molly finally pitches a winning game, earns the respect of her teammates and symbolically "lets go" of her need to understand her dad's death. Ages 10-up.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
| Price | Condition | Delivery | Seller | Action |
| $99.99 | Digital |
| WonderClub |
Mike Huthmaker
reviewed The Girl Who Threw Butterflies on November 23, 2009 The Girl Who Threw Butterflies
Molly Williams learned to throw a knuckleball pitch from her father. The two of them spent hours bonding over games of catch and watching baseball on TV as Molly grew up. But now Molly's father is gone - he died in a car accident a few months ago and 8th grader Molly is alone in her grief. Her workaholic, distracted mother is unavailable emotionally, and Molly just can't relate to her former teammates on the girls softball team any more. Impulsively, she tries out for the school baseball team as a way of expressing her true self, using her pitching talent and honoring the memory of her father. Molly's efforts to be accepted as the only girl on the team and to simultaneously work through the loss of her father are realistically chronicled in this short, poignant novel. Like the unpredictable flight of a knuckleball pitch ("Each floating and fluttering pitch was a little miracle. It was all about surprise"), Molly deals with sadness, anger, self-doubt and prejudice -- but also exhilaration, acceptance and reconciliation. Along the way she gets support from a loyal best friend, a caring coach, and the unexpected friendship of Lonnie, a catcher on the baseball team who understands what it's like to lose a parent, albeit through divorce.
Molly's voice rings true, and author Mick Cochrane does a fine job of capturing the experience of an adolescent who unexpectedly loses a parent. Secondary characters are well-developed, and Cochrane succeeds in combining gentle humor, sports action and touching emotional moments (as when Molly surreptitiously sneaks into her father's clothes closet and tries on his favorite brown corduroy jacket). This book would be an especially good choice for teens dealing with a loss of their own, but will provide important insight into the grief process for all readers. Both boys and girls will care about Molly and find themselves rooting for her to succeed. The Girl Who Threw Butterflies is an excellent addition to any middle school library.
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