Gordon Korman,
The Toilet Paper Tigers
Scholastic Inc.,1993, 2010.

Rating: G*

Korman hits it out of the ballpark with this one, for his specific target audience: pre-teen boys who love sports. In the tradition of hapless sports teams, the Feather Soft Tigers (named after the toilet paper manufactured by their sponsor!) are doomed to fail: their coach, a brilliant but absent-minded scientist, did not attend the pre-season draft, and the team is constituted of nine losers and left-overs. But when Coach Pendergast’s grand-daughter Kristy arrives for the summer, she makes it her mission to redeem the team.

The novel progresses chapter by chapter to tell the story of each player and his problems with performance on the diamond. Kristy obtains power over the players when she snaps "the photograph" of them in their jockstraps, and then threatens to post it on every locker in their school in September. Through her "cruel to be kind" methods, she threatens, bribes and cajoles each boy into being his best, and the team makes it to the playoffs. Each boy’s story is a chapter, narrated by left-fielder Corey Johnstone, who wants nothing more than to pitch, but is foiled at every step by the wily Kristy.

Korman wrote this novel in 1993, and the fact that "the photograph" is "locked on a piece of film" (p.11) and requires development at the Fotomat will be an enigma for many young students. Kristy’s language is also potentially dated, as she enjoys showing off her New York-ese to these hick Texans: "Cool your jets. Mellow out. Calm down. Take five. Make like a melon and chill." (p. 10)

This book is for the young reader who enjoys baseball, the comic potential of a 12 year-old boy who doesn’t excel at the sport, and a little bathroom humour, just for good measure.

Thematic Links: Baseball; Sports Stories; Humour

Patricia Jermey
Vol. 15, number 4
April 2010

*Rating System:
E - Excellent, enduring, everyone should see it!
G - Good, even great at times, generally useful!
A - Average, all right, has its applications.
P - Problematic, puzzling, poorly presented.