About this item
Did you ever hear the story of the Girl Wonder? Alta Weiss was born to play baseball, simple as that. From the age of two, when she hurls a corncob at a pesky tomcat, folks in her small Ohio town know one thing for sure: She may be a girl, but she's got some arm. When she's seventeen, Alta hears about a semipro team, the Independents. Here's her big chance! But one look at Alta's long skirts tells Coach all he needs to know -- girls can't play baseball! Faster than you can say "strike out!," Alta's convinced him to give her a chance. And so with the crowd buzzing and the big game up to her, Alta steps up to the pitcher's mound, determined to prove everybody wrong. Inspired by the life of pioneering female baseball player Alta Weiss, and dramatized by Terry Widener's bold illustrations, Girl Wonder tells the unforgettable story of a true American original.
About the Author
Deborah Hopkinson is as award-winning of picture books, fiction, and nonfiction for young readers. In 2013 she received a Robert F. Sibert Honor and YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction Award honor for Titanic: Voices from the Disaster. She has won the SCBWI Golden Kite Award for Picture Book Text twice, for A Band of Angels and Apples to Oregon. Sky Boys, How They Built the Empire State Building, was a Boston Globe/Horn Book Honor awardee. She lives near Portland, Oregon. The Great Trouble, A Mystery of London, the Blue Death, and a Boy Called Eel won the OCTE Oregon Spirit Award and was named a Best Book of 2013 by School Library Journal and an Oregon Book Award finalist.In 2017, Deborah's awards include the Leslie Bradshaw Oregon Book Award for Courage and Defiance; the Jane Addams Peace Association award for Steamboat School; and the Green Earth Environmental Stewardship Award for Follow the Moon Home, which was also a finalist for the Cook STEM prize. Her middle grade novel A Bandit's Tale, The Muddled Misadventures of a Pickpocket was a Charlotte Huck Recommended book for fiction. Visit her on the web at www.deborahhopkinson.com and follow her on Twitter at @deborahopkinson.
