HOLDING AT THIRD

Thirteen-year-old Matt, from a large, noisy, loving family, faces the cancer of his beloved 19-year-old brother Tom. But this is also a baseball story, and Zinnen writes about baseball, as she does about families and illness, with astonishing and lyrical precision. Matt and his mom are housesitting near the hospital where Tom is having last-ditch radiation; his father and the gaggle of younger children are at home. Matt left his middle-school team, where he’s a hero of sorts in both batting and fielding, and is enlisted by his new school, a sorry fourth place in the league. Zinnen does not prettify Tom’s desperate straits or his family’s reaction when he sneaks out of the hospital to marry his girlfriend. Nor does she gloss over Matt’s emotional struggles with a new school, a new team, and the insistent drumbeat of Tom’s deterioration. A note of hope, and sunlight, at the end will satisfy readers, who should be sure to keep the hankies handy. (Fiction. 10-12)