A deeply perceptive sports tale for young readers.
An underground drug operation affects the young baseball players of Williams County, Virginia, in Saur’s (Soccer Star, 2017, etc.) middle grade sports suspense novel.
Thirteen-year-old African-American Devon Horner’s best friend, Corey Strider, was arrested last summer after associating with drug dealer Preston Whiteside. Since then, Devon has resolved to stay far away from criminal activity in his economically depressed neighborhood. This has been a challenge, however, as Preston keeps pressuring him to join his crew. Later, after accusing Preston of giving up Corey to the cops, the drug dealer’s thugs chase Devon across town. Devon eventually ends up at a baseball game at a more affluent, predominantly white middle school. As a casual player, Devon quickly becomes fascinated with the team and strikes up a friendship with one of the players, a white boy named Henry Lee. As summer begins, Henry and his friend Kevin decide to join the Little League tournament at Devon’s church. However, the differences in the players’ backgrounds initially seem to be insurmountable; in order to come together as a team, the boys must embrace their commonalities. Meanwhile, two other students at Henry’s middle school newspaper investigate rumors that the school’s baseball team is involved in drug activity, and they start looking into the background of its mysterious coach, Dillon Wood. Ultimately, the various threads of the plot weave together in a page-turning climax. As might be expected, baseball games comprise a major part of this story. The detailed descriptions of various plays will obviously appeal most to sports enthusiasts, but Saur makes sure to keep them accessible to nonfans. More significantly, the author provides an insightful analysis of relationships between young people of different races and economic backgrounds. The characters are realistically portrayed as having complicated emotions, resulting in touching moments; a particularly poignant example is Devon’s secret feeling that Henry will abandon their friendship as soon as it becomes inconvenient. Overall, Saur skillfully handles the delicate subject matter and infuses the story with optimism.
A deeply perceptive sports tale for young readers.Pub Date: May 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-692-80648-7
Page Count: 452
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 26, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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