King of the Bench – Comeback Kid

Comeback Kid, a King of the Bench book for 9 year olds, is narrated by a boy whose great talent is sitting down.

What happens

Steve is a seventh grader at Spiro T. Agnew Middle School, home of the Mighty Plumbers, and he is very clear that he is the best benchwarmer in the city. Possibly the world. No brag. It is just a fact.

He is not bitter about it either, which is what makes him good company. He loves sport. He just never gets on the court unless the score is about a hundred to nothing or three starters have been injured in one afternoon.

This one is the basketball season. His friends are on the bench with him. Becky is the best athlete in the school and has none of the swagger. Joey is tiny and quick and can predict which way a player will dribble. Carlos complains constantly and can burp entire paragraphs, which he does when the team needs morale.

Then, in the middle of getting hammered 80 to 50, Steve spots a rat stealing a protein bar from under the bench and throws himself flat across the floor to save it.

He misses. The rat gets away. And twenty seconds later the Mighty Plumbers score on ten possessions in a row and win by one point.

Nobody saw the rat. Everybody saw the slide. And now Steve has to keep doing it.

That is a properly funny idea for a sports book, and it is why the whole thing stays cheerful. The joke is never on the kid who cannot play. It is on everyone who thinks a belly slide is what changed the game.

The humour is squarely gross. Earwax rolled into balls and stuck under the bench. Armpits pressed into a boy's face until he gags. A stadium that smells of twenty thousand people. Some children will think that is the best thing in the book. Some will not. You probably already know which yours is.

One thing to expect. It is set in American middle school, though there is nothing in it a younger reader would not follow or should not see.

What to read next

A narrator who is showing off and knows it is the whole appeal here. If that lands, Lose, Team, Lose! hands them Bernie Bridges, self-appointed quarterback of a boarding-school team called the Fighting Apples, who lose every single game and bleed a lot.