Jackie & Me (Baseball Card Adventures)

Written by Dan Gutman

Reviewed by Manuel C., BCCHS student

**This book can be found at your local library or bookstore.

The book Jackie and Me is a well-written book by Author Dan Gutman. It is a terrific 141-page book. This book is fiction, which means the class of literature comprising works of imaginative narration. Like every book, it has its strengths and it has its weaknesses.

This book is about a kid named Joe Stoshack who lives an unnormal lifestyle. He was a boy who lived in Louisville, Kentucky. He has the power and ability to touch baseball cards and travel through time, going to the date of which the card was printed. So he had a report assignment about Black History Month and decided to do his report on Jackie Robinson, who broke the color barrier in baseball. Stoshack decided to use his power of traveling through time to find information about Jackie Robinson and what he did and went through to make history and break the color barrier in baseball. Robinson entered the MLB (major league baseball) in 1947, but Joe Stoshack had a huge problem when a baseball card store owner named Flip told him no baseball cards were printed in 1947. Until Flip finally realized that Joe really needed a card of Jackie Robinson in 1947 he gave him a card of Jackie Robinson becoming a Dodger. So Joe went through time travel to Brooklyn, New York and became a great friend of Jackie’s and learned a lot and why white people judged Jackie for playing in the big leagues. He learned about racism and what a big difference it was between 1947 and the year he was in, but most importantly learned about Jackie Robinson and how he broke the color barrier in the MLB and made history that would last forever.

I chose this book because I always wanted to know how white people let people of color play the same game as them on the same team through a time when racism was a huge part of life. But it wasn’t that they let them; it was a fact that Robinson was a great player and got lucky to be given a chance to play in the big leagues with white people and be able to break a color barrier in baseball and make history. I thought this book was a great one because it had a great style of writing, had great details, didn’t lack any information, and motivated me to keep on reading. No, this is not my favorite book, but it is a book that I will soon read again. Like every other book this one had its strengths and weaknesses. Some of the strengths that this book had was it had a detailed setting, gave visual details, was entertaining, and had a great beginning, middle, and end. Some of its weaknesses were that it didn’t have enough characters, it had some unnecessary information, and sometimes took a while to end chapters. So after reading the book Jackie and Me, I rate it a four out five because it was a great book, but wasn’t the best ever that author Dan Gutman wrote.