#20 Kristy and the Walking Disaster

Is the kid in green

Pants a boy or girl? I don't

Have a clue. Do you?

Summary

Kristy's siblings and some of the BSC's sitting charges are into softball. They'd like to play on a team, but most of them are either too young or too awful to join Little League. Kristy hears about a neighborhood team run by Bart Taylor, and goes to ask him about letting the kids join. The bad news is that Bart doesn't have room on his team for all the kids Kristy has in mind, but the good news is that Bart is hot stuff and Kristy has a crush!

After talking to Bart, Kristy decides to start her own team. At the first meeting, Jackie Rodowsky comes up with the team's name: Kristy's Krushers. Karen hates the spelling because it's not correct, but no one pays attention to her. :) Kristy finds out pretty quickly that she's got an uphill battle with her new team. She's got "klutzes" (David Michael), kids who are afraid of the ball (Jamie Newton), walking disasters (Jackie R., of course), and even a kid who's too young to understand the game (Gabbie Perkins). Meanwhile, things are also tense with Bart. Some of his players show up at a Krushers practice and make fun of Kristy's players. Kristy thinks that Bart let it happen. Even so, she ever-so-coincidentally walks Shannon by the Taylor's house one night, and meets Bart walking his own dog. They agree to hold a real game between their teams in the near future.

Game day arrives. The Krushers fight pretty hard, but end up losing to the Bashers 16-11. The day isn't a total loss, though: afterwards, Bart offers to walk Kristy home. He apologizes for his team's earlier teasing, and they talk a little about how competitive they both are. Bart also asks Kristy if she wants to hang out, and she's pretty excited. I guess Bart is a step up from Alan Gray in her book!

Thoughts and Things

• This book should totally have been called Kristy and the Krushers. Jackie wasn't any more the focus of this book than he is in any of the others in which he makes an appearance.
• Bart's dog is a Rottweiler....named Twinkle. Hee hee hee.
• Speaking of, Rottweilers are big, but Bernese Mountain dogs are even bigger. A puppy Shannon's age shouldn't have been able to easily walk underneath Twinkle, like the book says she could.
• Kristy is actually kind of mean to some of the Krushers in her narration. She repeated calls Jackie Rodowsky a walking disaster, and I think she even calls him hopeless at one point. She also refers to her own brother as a klutz, and to Jake Kuhn as a fatso. Geez, Kristy!
• Normally, I'm not all that enthralled with the softball-related BSC books, but I really like the Krushers' team spirit in this one. They have every right to be proud about scoring 11 runs against the Bashers in their game!