USA To-Yay! Plunked opens season w/ a bang

It’s opening day of the baseball season, the Sox have as good a chance as anyone, and my book is in USA Today. Hot-frickin-dog, people. Bob Minzesheimer, the paper’s esteemed book critic, gives Plunked 3.5 stars (out of 4) and calls it a “kid-smart novel” and “an entertaining story about how the games we play can be mental as well as physical.”

I’m up in my hometown, for a school visit tomorrow in Litchfield, so I walked into the Salisbury Pharmacy this morning and bought two copies (out of 3). I’ve been going to that place my whole life. I used to spend my allowance on candy bars there—back when they were 25 cents! (Actually 27 cents with tax, and those two cents really hurt back then. What was I, made of pennies?)

There’s even a scene in Plunked that takes place in a (barely) fictionalized version of that pharmacy. Add it all together and picking up those papers was an oddly profound moment for me—it was all I could do not to break down and confess all of this to the lady behind the counter. Fortunately, I held it together. I think it helped that I was also buying deodorant.

Christopher Stengel’s awesome cover art
is above the fold!

Anyway, it’s on page 4D, along with a big picture of the cover. I think it’s awesome. But that’s just my two cents.