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
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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