Maniac Magee (1991)--Jerry Spinelli

I really enjoyed this one! A book with many lengthy descriptions of baseball and football plays, clearly targeted toward a young male audience, would not normally be my thing. But Spinelli's style won me over immediately. The story of a runaway orphan kid searching for a home on the streets of a fictional Pennsylvania city--and becoming an inscrutable neighborhood legend in the process--is written in an appealing narrative voice that struck me as very Modern Mark Twain. Part realism, part tall-tale, part playground mythology. The language is inventive, evocative, and musical--it draws you right in.