Stealing Home: Summer of 1958

by Roger Rule

Overview

“STEALING HOME” tells the story of 13-year-old William Martin, a child born in a white middle class family in Kansas City in 1958 when segregation was prevalent. After William’s tolerant father discovers that peer pressure has given William a prejudice worldview, maliciously believing everything he has ever heard about black people, Mr. Martin brings home a black orphan, Alex, hoping that getting to know Alex will remedy it. The two teenagers strike up an unlikely friendship. William’s life takes an unexpected turn when he and his mischievous friend, Robert, scheme to sneak Alex into a public segregated pool where Alex ends up saving a girl from drowning. William and Alex’s friendship is challenged when William’s prized possession, his baseball signed for him by the New York Yankees, turns up missing when Alex leaves his home. Alex is suspected of the theft and William finds his prejudiced feelings once again reinforced. He becomes a detective to find out the truth. Nowhere in the story is the “N” word used. The climax consists of a G-rated fight with Alex saving his white friends through his Judo training.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781665537131
Publisher:	AuthorHouse
Publication date:	09/03/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	138
File size:	521 KB

About the Author

The New York Times listed Stealing Home as one of thirty on their “Bookshelf Must-Have.” From Kirkus Reviews, September 3, 2021 “Rule offers a sensitive, if muted, depiction of Eisenhower-era racial tensions.” [About the main character] “William’s character arc is more fully explored in limpid prose that exposes his conflicting impulses, which are sometimes not at all admirable. Young readers will find his struggle with his attitudes believable and perhaps inspiring.” From The U.S.Review of Books, reviewer Mari Carlson writes: “Intended for middle readers, the book’s subject, form, and style are age-appropriate. The book highlights boys’ lives away from supervision. Scenes of swimming, bike riding, riding horses, and shooting guns make for a wholesome and historical read. Feelings are honest, handled with able adult guidance, and described in accessible language. The moral experience is couched in a personal narrative that is touching and easily applicable to others’ lives.” From Pacific Book Review, reviewer Allison Walker writes: Stealing Home: Summer of 1958, written by Roger Rule, is a sweet boyhood story with themes age-appropriate for middle schoolers. Rule does an admirable job writing about complex issues in ways which are easy for children to understand. Most of all, his book is interesting and exciting for children to read. Parents will be impressed by the lessons about empathy that Rule writes. The relationships between the characters really serve to deliver the main message of the book: that people, regardless of race, are complex. Good people can perform dishonest acts and cruel people can behave compassionately. Stealing Home is everything a child, and their parent, could want from a chapter book. Rule does an excellent job keeping the themes age-appropriate. … a book children will enjoy and parents will approve of.”

Editorial Reviews

2022-02-18
A White family and a Black orphan challenge prejudices in this YA novel.

Thirteen-year-old William Martin, who’s White, is in the middle of his summer vacation in 1958 in segregated Kansas City, Missouri, when he and his White best friend, Robert Newcomb, witness a White gang bullying and beating a Black teen at a local shopping center. However, the pair don’t intervene in any way. William’s parents, Evelyn and Mike, are appalled by the incident, and Mike decides that William and his 10-year-old sister, Karon, need more interaction with “colored” people, so he arranges for the family to host a Black child from a local orphanage for a weekend. Fourteen-year-old orphan Alex and William quickly bond over their shared love of checkers, model trains, and BB-gun target practice. On Sunday, the Martins bring Alex to a service at their all-White church; then, accompanied by Robert, they go to a park where racial barriers prove more daunting. After Alex returns to the orphanage, William discovers that his prized, autographed baseball has gone missing; he initially suspects that Alex is the thief but goes on to confront his own racist beliefs. Rule offers a sensitive, if muted, depiction of Eisenhower-era racial tensions. There’s not much psychological complexity, however; Alex is depicted as a paragon whose main narrative purpose is to undermine White people’s racist biases, and most adults reliably dispense anti-racist common sense: “For heaven’s sake, there are good colored people and bad colored people,” William’s Aunt Mildred says to her nephew at one point, “just like there are good white folk and bad white folk.” William’s character arc is more fully explored in limpid prose that exposes his conflicting impulses, which are sometimes not at all admirable: “I knew those teenage hoodlums were in the wrong, but I hadn’t considered getting involved, partly because I was worried about my own safety, and partly because I didn’t want to help the black kid.” Young readers will find his struggle with his attitudes believable and perhaps inspiring.

A sometimes-intriguing period yarn about reckoning with racism.

Kirkus Reviews