Hard Hit

As the pitcher on his HS team, Mark lives and breathes baseball. Sure, there's pressure from his coach and his dad, who both push him hard, but it's nothing that time with his buddy, Eddie, or with his crush, Diane, can't diffuse. But all that changes when Mark's dad is diagnosed with cancer, and everything Mark has ever believed in--love, God, and baseball--is called into question.This profoundly affecting novel in verse traces the physical and emotional journey of a boy in crisis, and all the requisite emotions--anger, denial, fear, bargaining, sadness, & acceptance--that accompany loss.

Ann Turner began her writing career as a poet and has subsequently published more than thirty-five critically acclaimed books for young readers, ranging in age from kindergarten through High School. She was born in Northampton, Massachusetts and grew up in Williamsburg, a small, rural town nearby, where she currently lives with her husband and two teenagers. She graduated from Bates College in Maine and studied abroad during her junior year in Oxford, England, also studying at the University of Massachusetts, where she received an M.A.T. in 1968. She taught High School English for one year but decided that she would rather write books than teach them, depending on all the wonderful teachers to help put her books into the hands of children and teenagers.