A coming-of-age novel about a young man’s ambition to play Major League Baseball and the lifelong friendship that guided him along the way.
Baseball: our national pastime; a game of tradition and history that recalls a simpler era. It’s also a billion-dollar industry that showcases celebrity talent. Snellgrove, in his debut, looks deep into the psychology of the game’s players as they fight for a big-league position. Ultimately, it’s a novel about the myth of boyhood dreams, the limitations of ability and the realization that wanting it all can be too much. The unnamed protagonist begins his story by recollecting his earliest competitive desires, which were fulfilled by the challenges he and his best friend, Danny, waged for nearly any activity—at times risking their lives. The two boys grow up, however, and learn that the childish games of their past have now perfectly primed them for higher-level sports. While Danny excels at both football and baseball, he grows despondent at being only 5 feet 7 inches; he knows scouts will never notice him. But the narrator becomes a standout ball player, and his skill is matched by his stature; he’s drafted into the minor leagues right out of high school. From this point on, the two men grow distant as their competitiveness leads them into different lives: Danny becomes a local football coach, and the narrator continues to persevere through grinding but successful minor league seasons. The narrator feels like Danny is just as capable as he is of playing at this level, but he also recognizes his own talent and fortune, which doesn’t make success any easier. Snellgrove deftly illustrates the pressures on ball players vying for select spots, even on a minor league team. In one particularly heartrending scene, the narrator succumbs to his cutthroat competitive nature by taking testosterone supplements to give him an edge. Solid character-building makes such real-life decisions that much more believable and tragic.
A sturdy sports novel with much greater appeal.Pub Date: April 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-0979788505
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Loaded Press
Review Posted Online: July 9, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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