Loaded Bases

That girl's about 5 seconds away from learning Giantopia definitely isn't inside her locker.

Gemma Hopper, the lead character in Brie Spangler's Fox Point's Own Gemma Hopper, is a 13-year old who feels like she's being crushed by the weight of too many things, unnoticed by anyone. Her mother is absent, the specifics only hinted at, and her dad seems to always be working. Which leaves care of her twin younger brothers, and the house in general, entirely to Gemma.

You might think her older brother Teddy could help, but he's busy being the hotshot baseball star, everyone's darling. Gemma's reduced to being the pitching machine for his hitting exhibitions. She's tall for her age, and awkward about it. Spangler draws Gemma looking twice the height of her best friend Bailey, and at least as tall as her brother or dad. School is an endless string of things, trying to get in with the popular crowd is a struggle, it's just a lot.

Some things Spangler shows us, like a three-page sequence of laundry day. A panel of Gemma moving through the rooms, gathering clothes, lugging them to the laundromat, washing, folding, and coming home to her little brothers still scarfing chips in front of the TV like they were when they left. 

Sometimes, Spangler leaves it to the imagination. When Gemma's letting her brother show off, she does it by throwing at least a half-dozen different pitches to the exact locations he tells her to. It's not commented on, since Teddy is swatting them all over the park, but that's pretty impressive for a 13-year, both in the number of pitches and the command of them she must have. So when she gets fed up playing the comic sidekick for Teddy's ego boost, it's sort of a natural outcome of what we've already seen.

Spangler avoids making the story just an airing of grievances of Gemma, by having her make her own missteps. Gemma has a few heart-to-hearts with Teddy that help her see his perspective on his own fame, even if Teddy's attempts to help feel at least a little self-serving. When taking Bailey's advice on a school project goes awry, Gemma throws Bailey under the bus in a moment of frustration. She tries to just ignore everyone for a day or two (Spangler illustrates this in a simplified style of Gemma navigating some dotted line trail like one of those Family Circus cartoon strips where the kid takes the ludicrously roundabout course to cross the street), and that gets her chewed out by Bailey when the girl finally corners her. Gemma's so wrapped up in what's weighing her down and thinking she's on her own, she missed the people who were actually trying to help her.

I'm not sure how I feel about the ending. Gemma gets her moment to shine and be seen, which is good. More importantly, while nervous, she doesn't run from it. Spangler has Gemma trying to pitch while being mocked by a spectral version of herself (with wavier hair), which Spangler outlines in red, rather than the blue that dominates the book otherwise.

But it still feels as though her father only notices the amount of stuff he just sort of dumped on her to deal with because he's been told she's really good at baseball, which he's crazy about*. In much the same way that baseball was just something fun he did with Gemma and Teddy, until he saw Teddy's talent. Then it was serious business for Teddy, and Gemma was left behind to handle all the things Mr. Baseball was too busy for.

* The twins are named "Pedro" and "Carl", and I assume that's for Carl Yastrzemski, but my mind first went to Carl Everett, who played on the Red Sox with Pedro Martinez and all I could think was, "You named your kid after the guy who said he didn't believe in dinosaurs because he'd never seen one?"