Keeper

Name: Keeper
Price: 2.7 USD
Availability: InStock
ISBN: 9780763632861

ISBN-10: 0763632864

ISBN-13: 9780763632861

Edition: N/A

Authors: Mal Peet

List price: $6.99

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Description:

"This stirring adventure -- a soccer story? a ghost story? -- defies expectations. . . . Both lyrical and gripping." -- KIRKUS REVIEWS (starred review) When Paul Faustino of LA NACION flips on his tape recorder for an exclusive interview with El Gato -- the phenomenal goalkeeper who single-handedly brought his team the World Cup -- the seasoned reporter quickly learns that this will be no ordinary story. Instead, the legendary El Gato narrates a spellbinding tale that begins in the South American rainforest, where a ghostly but very real mentor, the Keeper, emerges to teach a poor, gawky boy the most thrilling secrets of the game. A seamless blend of magic realism and exhilarating soccer…

Book details

List price: $6.99
Publisher: Candlewick Press
Publication date: 2/13/2007
Binding: Paperback
Pages: 240
Size: 5.25" wide x 7.50" long x 0.75" tall
Weight: 0.484
Language: English



You probably don't think this is remarkable. But if you knew the jungle, you would find it hard to believe me, because an open space in the jungle is not possible. Something, anything, will occupy any space where it can find light to live and grow. Yet here was this clearing, and it was covered in grass. Yes, grass. Short grass. Turf. Impossible. Absolutely impossible. I walked out onto this grass very slowly, far more alarmed by this clearing than by any plant or creature I had met in the jungle itself.... I was in a space that was about one hundred yards long and maybe half as wide, and I had walked out of the forest at a point about halfway down its length. I looked at first to my left and saw how the clearing ended in a dense, shadowy wall of trees. Then I looked to my right. And froze.


Standing there, with its back to the trees, was a goal. A soccer goal. Two uprights and a crossbar. With a net. A net fixed up like the old-fashioned ones, pulled back and tied to two poles behind the goal. My brain stood still in my head. I could hear the thumping of my blood. I must have looked like an idiot, my eyes mad and staring, my mouth hanging open. Eventually I found the nerve to take a few steps toward this goal, this quite impossible goal. The woodwork was a silvery gray, and the grain of the wood was open and rough. Weathered, like the timber of old boats left for years on the beach. It shone slightly. The net had the same color, like cobwebs, and thin green plant tendrils grew up the two poles that supported it.


It seemed to take an age, my whole life, to walk into that goalmouth. When I got there, I put out my hands and held the net. It was sound and strong, despite its great age. I was completely baffled and stood there, my fingers in the mesh of the net and my back to the clearing, trying, and failing, to make sense of all this.


And then my fingers began to tremble, and then my legs, because I was suddenly certain that I was not alone.


______________


KEEPER by Mal Peet. Copyright (c) 2005 by Mal Peet. Published by Candlewick Press, Inc., Cambridge, MA.