Editor’s note: Trudy Haywood Saunders will sign copies of her book “Bigfoot and Basketball” starting at 9:30 a.m. Saturday (Sept. 29) at the Paw. Stop by and pick up a special copy of the book and enjoy some great coffee and treats.
By Bob Tedder • “Bigfoot & Basketball: A Lannie Reese Mystery” by Montgomery County educator and author Trudy Haywood Saunders is a clever admixture of cryptozoology and the seamy side of ambition-fueled sports. The book is targeted toward a middle-school reading audience and it is on this level the story garners the kudos it deserves. Within its pages one finds precocious students, BFFs, star jocks, that one teacher we all remember, and an arrogant coach. All apparently coalesce around a team of Bigfoot researchers newly arrived in town in their interminable search to explain the inexplicable. However, a freshly discovered corpse coupled with an emerging basketball scandal leaves a bigger footprint on the community than the search for Sasquatch.
Ms. Lannie Reese, star reporter for the high school newspaper in the time-honored tradition of Nancy Drew, proves to be a sleuth equal to the detective abilities of her sheriff father. The dialogue-driven script moves rapidly toward a well-reasoned resolution.
While most rural American middle schoolers can identify with both the book’s characters and its storyline, this is not the case for an adult reading audience. Older readers outside the geographic reach of the novel will find little of interest. The allure for local adult readers lies in the comfort of that which is familiar. For that reading audience, regardless of the solace of geographic recognition, there still arises a niggling and disruptive desire to fact check the morphology of the book’s landscape. Doing so is, of course, unfair to the author’s storytelling intent, yet the same sparse dialogue-driven narrative that appeals to the younger reader causes the older to long for a more descriptive treatment of the book’s understated environment.
The book’s denouement arrives early, hidden in plain sight on pages 195 and 201. Now that you have turned to those pages bear this clue in mind: Who is the muse of history? Nonetheless, “Bigfoot & Basketball” is a great savory weekend read for a middle schooler and a tasty if not filling afternoon snack for those adults curious about what their children are reading.