Attention soccer moms and soccer dads! The children’s book, The Golden Nutmeg: A Soccer Adventure, by Christopher Tozier and illustrated by Jake Deibler, is a novel for soccer enthusiasts. If you and/or your child lives, breathes, and eats soccer, this book, as the title suggests, is a “soccer adventure.”
In The Golden Nutmeg: A Soccer Adventure, a boy named Revel Harrison narrates his team’s games and becomes friends with another teammate named Tommy. Revel’s parents loses their factory jobs when two major employers shut their doors. Even Tommy’s father, who held a management position at the factory where Revel’s mom used to work, had to find a new job. However, with the economic and emotional strain of the two major employers putting so many adults out of work, as a reader, I would have expected these economic problems to negatively affect the attitudes, behaviors, emotional states, and athletic performances of their children. Instead, almost every chapter was dedicated to the play-by-play activities during games, scrimmages, and practices as if the parents’ reduced income played little or no effect in their lives when it should have. If you and/or your child soaks in the play-by-play reporting of sportscasters, then The Golden Nutmeg: A Soccer Adventure is designed especially for you. For those of us, who don’t know anything about sports and, particularly, soccer, you might expect more tension between the characters given the circumstances in the story and expect personal growth and/or accomplishment for the protagonist by the end of the story.
The golden nutmeg is explained in the book by character, Tommy, to be a sports move in a soccer game. Tommy aspired to perform the golden nutmeg during a game. Revel was the protagonist, but the golden nutmeg was Tommy’s goal. The golden nutmeg is a victory for the player, who performs it, and a humiliating, emotional defeat for the player, whom it is performed against. However, a player could be emotionally defeated in other ways such as being teased by one’s own teammates and/or best friend.
I think The Golden Nutmeg: A Soccer Adventure is a good book for children and their parents, who are obsessed with sports and, in particular, soccer. However, I think this book could have a wider audience if the mass unemployment of the parents in town was capitalized upon by Tozier to show how these economic strains negatively affects a child’s morale. I am not a person, who understands or follows any kind of sport. The soccer angle is fine, but as a reader, I would like more tension and conflict for the protagonist and supporting characters to struggle against and/or to overcome. As a reader, who does not follow sports news, I would prefer to see a balance in the story between the soccer plays and other events affecting the kids’ lives such as mass unemployment in town.
Even though my assessments might seem a little tough, I realize there is still an audience for this novel. I grew up reading Little Women, Black Beauty, 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, and Around the World in 80 Days at a young age without having a teacher assign these stories to me and, perhaps, I am unfairly measuring new, modern or post-modern literature against the “classics.” When this book is released, read this book for yourselves and with your children, and post your comments on the Land of Books and Honey book review blog. If you think I missed the theme and the plot, let me know. According to Amazon.com, The Golden Nutmeg: A Soccer Adventure will be released on September 15, 2017. I have read a review copy of the book, but I hope some improvements can be made by the release date such as changing the nickname for the character, Tommy.
I am not a sports enthusiast, so I do not feel like I am this book’s ideal audience. This book has eleven chapters, contains less than 200 pages, and contains at least one illustration for each of the first ten chapters. The children, whom I read to, are now seven and four years old and they will not pay attention to a book with so many words and pages and with so few illustrations, yet. I think this novel is appropriate for children from ten to twelve years old. It depends more on your child’s development and abilities than age.
Remember, the title of this book is The Golden Nutmeg; A Soccer Adventure. The novel is largely about playing soccer. Most of this book’s content describes soccer plays. If you and your child or children love soccer that much, then this book is for you.
Reference
Tozier, Christopher. The Golden Nutmeg: A Soccer Adventure. Eustis: Hontoon Press, Inc.: 2017.
Links:
Biography of Christopher Tozier at christophertozier.com
Social media profile for Jake Deibler at LinkedIn.com
The Golden Nutmeg: A Soccer Adventure by Christopher Tozier at Amazon.com
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