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Saving Arm Pit

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Saving Arm Pit
by Natalie Hyde
Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 2011. 136 pgs. Fiction

When Harmony Point's postmistress retires, it is good news for the Harmony Point Terriers baseball team because the new postmaster actually knows something about baseball and agrees to coach them. Long the cellar dwellers of the league, the Terriers actually make a run in one game, and then improve exponentially under Coach Blackmore. But then. . . the territorial postal service decides Harmony Point (aka, Arm Pit, with certain letters on the town welcome sign strategically spray-painted out) is too small for a post office so there goes the coach. The Terriers decide to fight back by mailing a zillion letters but it turns out that incoming mail provides the volume count, so their zillion letters have to be addressed to someone who will write back. Will the post office be saved so the coach can stay? and more importantly, will Miss Apfelbaum keep making her raspberry danish for the team if the coach is gone? These questions and many more will be answered with a solution more elegant than any of the Terriers might have imagined. A terrific, funny, middle grade book for kids who like baseball and kids who don't.
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