Nonfiction Monday: My first book of Soccer by Beth Bugler and Mark Bechtel, illustrated by Bill Hinds

Well, that took long enough. I've long noticed that Sports Illustrated Kids books seem to mostly forget the existence of contemporary female athletes and that's been extremely obvious in their Rookie series. I've added review copies and purchased the ones I needed, but I have been extremely annoyed at the lack of women in the previous three titles on Hockey, Football, and Baseball. I hope that publisher will revise those previous titles to include women more equally (or at all).

The narrators are a confused (white) boy, who doesn't quite get the rules of soccer (or that most of the world calls it football) and a sparky, enthusiastic, dark-skinned girl. The book follows the format of the previous titles, explaining how the game works, the rules, functions of the players, scoring system, and a few traditions of the game. It's illustrated with pictures of real athletes, captioned with humorous dialogue, against a background of colorful pages. The big difference in this book is that a good half of the athletes pictured are women.

Verdict: These books are very popular and check out constantly, but this is the first one I'm actually happy to put on the shelf. Now, if the publisher just does the same thing with Basketball and goes back and fixes the previous books, I'll be buying extra copies asap.

ISBN: 9781683300021; Published by Sports Illustrated Kids/Capstone; Review copy provided by publisher; Donated to the library