Reluctant readers get in the game with books about sport

By Karen Hardy
Updated October 23 2014 - 10:08am, first published October 18 2014 - 12:00am

For any parent of a child who'd rather be outside kicking a football than inside reading a book, book selection can be a fine art. You can try fantasy, you can try mystery but often they drift wide of the goalposts, so to speak. My own 11-year-old son is one of these boys. A few years ago I stumbled across Michael Wagner's books, Maxx Rumble Cricket. It was a compendium of eight smaller books rolled into one, a season full of stories and statistics about a young cricket team. It was the first book he read cover to cover. Now, with more regularity than a Glenn McGrath over, it makes an appearance at the start of each cricket season, to be read again.