Samurai Shortstop is one of the best books I have ever read. It is very interesting and it has a good message. Winning as a team is the theme of this book. This book is about a young boy named Toyo that goes to samurai school, in Japan. Toyo has to learn the ways of a samurai and he also plays on the baseball team. Throughout the book, the training his dad makes him do is rather interesting. For one of his training sessions, he had to go into a forest at night where a lot of dangerous animals are and also where his uncle was killed to do five-hundred swings with his sword and to meditate. The five-hundred swings a day with the sword is something that made Toyo stronger and better at baseball.

Toyo uses the skills he learns from samurai training to help the other boys on his baseball team. That way he is helping the rest of the team improve along with him. The conflict in the book, is that Toyo’s baseball team has to try to beat this really good Japanese team coached by Americans. So, the whole team had to practice really hard for this tough game. The thing I really didn’t enjoy about this book was that it was fairly easy to read and it did not have a lot of hard vocabulary in it.

Overall, Samurai Shortstop is an amazing book but a little too easy for me to read. After reading this book that was of much interest to me, I will start recommending it to other kids that need a book for a project relating to historical fiction or just for a book to read for fun.