You Never Heard of Sandy Koufax?!

You Never Heard of Sandy Koufax?!
by Jonah Winter and Andre Carrilho

My Thoughts:

I loved this book and couldn’t wait to share it with the children at my school. As I’d expected, they loved the cover, a wonderful lenticular picture of Koufax pitching.. They also loved the way the illustrator used gold on the pictures here and there.

The story was a little too hard for them. They were confused with the author’s use of first person plural. They did not get the way the author used the vernacular voice to tell the story. They needed more background information about Koufax.

But they loved that it was about a baseball player. They liked the voice of the author and thought it was fun. When it came down to voting, the room was clearly divided: Children who loved baseball rated it a 5 and those who did not like baseball rated the book a 1.

It is a book with wonderful facts about a fascinating man. I would suspect that ten and eleven year olds would enjoy the book a bit more than my young students, but I bet that a lot of the cleverness and fun of the book would elude even them.

Maybe we need to create a new category of books: Picture Books for Grownups. I loved this book and would definitely recommend it to parents or teachers to read with their kids who love baseball. Not sure many children would really hang in there with the book on his own. Not even a big baseball fan. Not even a big baseball fan living in NY.

A Sample:

‘One day one of our scouts, Al Campanis, invites Sandy to Ebbets Field---home of our team, the Brooklyn Dodgers---so’s he can see the hotshot pitch. After battin’ just one time against him, Campanis has seen enough. He says to Sandy, “Kid, how’d you like to play for us. Don’t think too hard.” Quick as you can say “Jackie Robinson,” this nineteen-year-old squirt was wearin’ Dodgers blue and earnin’ more dough than some of us old-timers.’

Children’s Comments:

Elyssa, 6, said, "I liked how the words were written."
Chloe, 6, said, "I liked how he did the glove."
Sylvia, 5, said, "I liked the front cover.
Jase, 5, said, "I liked the pictures."
Children’s Ratings: 5, 1, 5, 5, 5, 5, 1, 5, 1