A stirring, atmospheric tale that explores the world of women’s football.
A debut sports novel focuses on professional women’s football in America.
In her book, Douglas draws on her 19 years of experience as the owner of the New York Sharks women’s pro football team to tell the story of a young athlete from Florida named Christine who dreams of playing the sport. As the author evocatively writes, the sport is woven into the cultural DNA of the region for half the population: “Football is the southern males’ identity and if their team is no good, their kingdom is not whole. A winning team, on the other hand, is southern salve—the cure-all, and the key to the good life.” As Christine learns while still a child, this immense sense of self-validation through football is exclusively a male inheritance. Through grit and perseverance, she seeks to find a way to live as she pleases, telling the therapist her mother takes her to that she knows Southern culture expects her to be “demure and cautious,” but, as she puts it, “I’d rather kick ass.” The tale follows her path to professional fulfillment, joining the Long Island Sharks, coming to know her teammates, and experiencing all the joys and stresses in her personal life that will be familiar to readers from the vast library of male-oriented football fiction. The team’s fortunes are chronicled in a series of intensely dramatized chapters filled with well-drawn characters caught up in the dream of overcoming their restrictive culture. “We are competitors and we crave the opportunity to prove ourselves,” thinks Christine at one point, and this stand is shared by all of her teammates as well. “Why do we play this game, any of us, male or female?” Douglas asks. “Is it some primitive need to demonstrate physical prowess? Or is it more simple than that…the joy of simply doing something for which we have an affinity?” In the course of her clearly autobiographical storytelling, she very skillfully captures that delight in simply doing something. She brings her various Sharks to life in ways that often feel more immediate than might have been possible in a memoir. She likewise vividly captures the broader sphere of women’s professional sports, a world that will be new to most readers. The settings outside of the sport are similarly well drawn, from the feel of the small-town South to the horror of Christine witnessing the 9/11 attacks in Manhattan firsthand, looking through binoculars at the shocking aftermath: “Bodies. Live humans are falling from the towers. Arms out, spinning and cart-wheeling and I am breathless as I try to assimilate what my eyes are seeing.” The author also conveys the rough humor and heartbreaking losses that are part of the camaraderie of any hard-fighting professional sports team—elements that readers have encountered many times in novels and memoirs, but are more strikingly dramatized in these pages because they’re seen through the perspective of Christine and her teammates, coaches, and adversaries. The book’s honest, straightforward tone makes it captivating reading.
A stirring, atmospheric tale that explores the world of women’s football.Pub Date: July 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73358-350-3
Page Count: 310
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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