Rick Kotani’s 400 Million Dollar Summer

Gr 5 Up–Rick Kotani has his summer all planned out: baseball, video games, and hanging out with friends. All of that changes with one phone call. Now Rick and his mom are headed to his grandpa’s house in Oregon for the summer. With no friends and no baseball, Rick’s hopes of having a great summer are quickly fading. But a chance encounter with Toni, a girl who knows her game, brings him back into the baseball world and a chance to make new friends. As the summer progresses, Rick realizes what real friends look like, and that baseball is not the end-all-be-all. The title of this book is slightly inaccurate. From the beginning, it sets it up to be all about baseball, but the sport takes a backseat at times to the other story lines. The author has created an arc that shows the two generations, Rick and his grandfather, building a relationship that had not existed previously. There is a cultural gap between the two, but the grandpa introduces a Japanese children’s tale that bridges the distance. Readers may struggle with the pacing of this story. At times, the plot loses momentum. Secondary characters are not fully fleshed out, and some side stories have no resolutions.