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The Girls Take Over

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Overview

The race is on! The Hatford boys and the Malloy girls are ready to outdo one another again. Eddie is the first girl to ever try out for the school baseball team. Now she and Jake are competing for the same position, while Caroline and Wally compete for class spelling bee champ. Wally is itching to win, but Caroline the show-off plans to be number one.

As if that wasn't enough, the kids decide to race bottles down the rising Buckman River to see whose will go the farthest by the end of the month. The winner will be queen or king for the day while the other kids act as servants. But neither team trusts the other. When the girls go down to the river to try and capture the boys' bottles, Caroline falls into the rising water. It looks like those Malloy girls may be in over their heads this time!

Editorial Reviews

In the eighth book of the series starring the Hatford boys and Malloy girls, the sexes do battle on the baseball diamond, then challenge one another to a bottle race down the Buckman River for the title of king or queen for a day in The Girls Take Over by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor. Ages 9-12.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Author Information

Bio of Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

Newbery Medalist Phyllis Reynolds Naylor grew up in Anderson, Indiana, and Joliet, Illinois. She wrote her first book when she was in kindergarten and sold her first story when she was 16 for $4.67. Naylor worked as a teacher and an editor before she began to write full-time in 1960. Her first book, about a disastrous first marriage to a man who became mentally ill, was for adults. She sold her first book for children in 1965. Since then, she has written more than 80 books for children and adults. Her book Boys in Control, features the return of young readers' favorite feuding families--the Hatford boys and the Malloy girls--from her earlier books, The Boys Start the War, The Girls Get Even, and Boys Against Girls. Phyllis Reynolds Naylor lives in Bethesda, Maryland with her husband, Rex who is a speech pathologist. They have two grown sons and two granddaughters. "I think I wanted to be a writer because my parents read aloud to us every night until we were about 15 years old. They read Grimm's fairy tales, the Bible storybook, all of Mark Twain's books, Alice in Wonderland, The Wind in the Willows--and I think I probably felt that if listening to stories was so much fun, writing them would be even better. And it is. I love being involved in the characters and plot and just the whole mess of writing, it's such a wonderful mess to me. "I would like readers to develop more tolerance for people who are different, for ideas that are different, to come to realize that sometimes there isn't just one right way to do something. People see different possibilities in a situation, and the solutions they come up with may be very different." About the Boy-Girl Battle Books "It's always fun for me to do another book in the Boy-Girl Battle Books series. I think I enjoy them as much as the kids, and according to the stacks of letters I receive, they like them a lot. The idea for the series came to me when I was speaking at a school, and as the kids filed noisily into the gym, one teacher yelled, 'If you don't settle down, I'm going to seat you boy/girl/boy/girl.' The gym was so quiet you could hear nothing but breathing. 'Aha!' I thought. The universal theme! The antagonism between boys and girls, ages 9 to 12. In one chapter, the girls may be one up on the boys; in the next, the boys may have the upper hand. There will be 12 books in all, and already the kids are asking, 'Who wins the war?' My lips are sealed."

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Additional Info

Imprint

Yearling

Filesize

823.19 KB

Number of Pages

160

eBook ISBN

9780307528582

Excerpt from: The Girls Take Over by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

One Dreaming It was the month Eddie Malloy had been waiting for--tryouts for the Buckman Elementary baseball team--only sixth graders allowed. For Caroline, however, April looked as though it might be the most boring month since they'd moved to Buckman. She didn't care much for sports, but she knew how desperately her oldest sister wanted to get on the team. What Caroline most wanted was for something exciting to happen to her--something so dramatic it would get her picture in the newspaper. But Eddie was fuming about the rain. "Look at it!" she wailed, staring out at the dismal West Virginia sky. The sun, which took its sweet time rising above the hills each morning, hadn't shown for a week. "I'll bet we won't have tryouts today after all!" Eddie, Caroline, and Beth were finishing their toast, getting ready to return to school after spring vacation. "You've got a whole month, Eddie. The games don't begin till May," Beth told her. Beth was in the fifth grade, and Caroline, being precocious, was in fourth, having been moved up a year. "Relax!" Beth said. "I can't," said Eddie. "This is my one chance to show Jake Hatford that he's not the only good player around." Mrs. Malloy came into the kitchen in her robe. "Gracious, I overslept!" she said. "It's a good thing you girls got yourselves up. This rain just makes me want to stay in bed. It's a good day for dreaming." Mr. Malloy followed next and went directly to the coffeemaker. He was singing his usual song, the words being "I hate to get up in the mooorn-ing," and the girls rolled their eyes at each other. He was coaching Buckman College's football team this year in a teacher-exchange program. Whether or not he would move his family back to Ohio in September was still very much up in the air. "Better wear your yellow slickers," Mrs. Malloy told the girls. "It's supposed to rain all day." Eddie groaned and looked out the window and down the hill toward the river. The Buckman River, ordinarily shallow, was swollen now by all the rain. It entered town on one side of Island Avenue, where the family was staying, looped around under the road bridge to the business district, and went back out of Buckman again on the other side. "Well," Eddie said finally. "If I never become a professional baseball player, I guess I'll be a scientist. That's my second choice." "Good thinking," said her father. "Keep your bases covered." He grinned. Beth had her nose stuck in a book as usual while she ate, her hand blindly reaching out to feel around the table for her orange juice. She never once took her eyes off the page. "If she'd only read decent stuff!" her mother had once complained, because the stories Beth liked best were about human centipedes and creatures under the sea. Beth was currently reading a book called The Village of the Vampire Ants. Beth didn't give much thought to what she wanted to be when she was grown. No one ever asked Caroline what she wanted to be when she grew up because she talked about it constantly: the world's greatest actress, that's what. She could see her name in lights on Broadway: Caroline Lenore Malloy, starring in . . . play after play after play. As the Malloy girls crossed the swinging bridge that took them to College Avenue, they saw the Hatford boys waiting for them on the other side. Despite all the boys' tricks and teasing since the girls had come to Buckman, the Malloy sisters had started walking to school with them when a strange animal--which the newspaper called an abaguchie because no one knew what it was--had been sighted in the area. It had later been found to be a cougar, and the Hatford and Malloy parents had insisted their seven children walk together to and from school for protect