This is a funny, good, novel about a boy who's mom coaches a baseball team.

I remember my fourth grade teacher reading this book aloud to the class the year it came out. For a girl growing up in the Midwestern suburbs, it was a revelation. I wouldn't even see a real bagel until I went to college eight years later. Re-reading it as an adult allowed me to see how good a writer Konigsberg truly was. She wove very adult themes such as anti-semitism into a "children's book" with sensitivity, while telling a very relatable, very funny story about family and about America's favorite pastime.

Interesting tale of a boy and his relationships as they change during a season of Little League. My son continues reading through E. L. Konigsburg.

I originally picked up this book because my nine-yr-old is very much into baseball and I wanted to see if this is a good pick for our read-aloud. Since it has Playboy in it, I don't think I'll read it for him (yet). It was a cute story - kind of a typical friends-growing-apart-and-coming-back-together story and family growing together. I enjoyed the characters, and it was a good refresher after having read a difficult (but very meaningful) book such as the Slave Dancer.

This is my husband's favorite book so I read it when I was feeling down and found it a well written-comforting story about childhood struggles.

Loved this book as a kid!!!

I have found most of this author's books to be delightful little bites of life. This book is the same. Not a specific plot per se, just a piece out of a family's life told from the perspective of the nearly 12 year old son. Love the Jewish families. Don't know why, just do. It's like reading about a pioneer or pilgrim or mining family, it just fits as a little piece of American life with the deligthful language/word usage that is singular to eastern American Jewish families, mixed up with the fun observations from a growing boy's point of view.

This book is as wonderful as I remember it, probably even better than I remember it, because I now relate to it as a mom who coaches her son’s sports team, in addition to relating to it as a kid who was coached by a parent. But it also falls into this sub-genre of middle grade bar mitzvah novels which I find so moving. Finding The Worm, by Mark Goldblatt, takes place in the 1970s, also about bar mitzvahs and best friends and baseball. I’m not sure my son actually relates to these novels as much as I project him relating to them when I read them with him, but maybe he will some day.

This review also appears on my blog, Read-at-Home Mom.

About the B'nai Bagels was first published in 1969, on the heels of Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth, and From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, which won a 1968 Newbery honor and the 1968 Newbery medal respectively. It had a couple of tough acts to follow, but overall, I think it rose to the occasion.

Mark Setzer is twelve years old. He's coping with the loss of his best friend who has recently moved to a richer part of town and made a snobby new friend, while also preparing for his bar mitzvah, and trying to get out of the shadow of his over-achieving older brother, Spencer. On top of that, his mother has volunteered to manage his little league team. When Mark becomes aware of some information that could jeopardize the team's success and undermine all his mother's work, he wonders whether he should tell, or keep it to himself. What he decides, in the end, results in a coming of age experience that puts Mark firmly on the path to adulthood.

The language in the book now seems quite dated, but I actually enjoyed that aspect of it. I think it might bother a contemporary young reader, but as an adult, I've become interested in some of the older, forgotten children's books, and I enjoyed being immersed in the style and context of another time period. I also enjoyed Mark's wry observations about his family life, his interactions with other boys on his team, and in his neighborhood, his struggle to hang onto aspects of his lost friendship, and most of all, the humorous and realistic dialogue Konigsburg writes for the Setzer family.

I think adults who enjoy children's literature, and like to look back as well as forward, should definitely read this book. Kids, though, will be harder to sell on it, unless they really like realistic fiction,or have an interest in what day to day life was like in the late 1960s. There's not even really enough actual baseball action in this book to make it appeal to baseball fans. There will be the rare kid, though, who will read this and love it, and whoever that kid is, I hope he stops by my desk in the library to talk about it when he's done.

The book that Konigsburg wrote AFTER Mixed-Up Files, this book is a delicious stew of hapless Little Leaguers, a Jewish mother who addresses God through the ceiling lamp, and nickel-a-peep Playboy entrepeneurs. Watch this unlikely team of misfits go through a kooky training period where it seems like... well, it seems like nothing is going to go right.

best book about duckys!

I read this book while working for a company I realllllly didn't like. So it will always kind of live in my head in the same space. But I remember this book being clever, especially the ending. It was that kind of clever where the author has made you believe you can trust her, and then she takes you on a wild ride in the last crucial chapters. Kind of like Ocean's 11. But with Jewish teenagers instead of hot outlaws.