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THE BASEBALL

Name: THE BASEBALL
Author: James Flerlage
ISBN: 978-0-9898281-2-3

by James Flerlage ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A

A familiar tale, but one that has a melodramatic sincerity.

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In Flerlage’s (Before Bethlehem, 2012) short novel, a woman cleaning up a cellar finds a keepsake that conjures painful memories of love and loss.

When Lucy gets the “coveted chore” of sweeping her grandfather Landon Myers’ cellar, she expects to find nothing more than dust and mouse droppings there. She does find a couple of dead mice, and even a snakeskin, but the real discovery is an old baseball. She can tell right away that it means something to her grandfather: “As he took it, his heart raced; sweat formed above his thin white eyebrows.” After he collects himself, he tells Lucy the story of the ball, and of his life before he married her grandmother. In 1975, Landon was a celebrated pediatric oncologist, recently divorced, and the father of a young son, Alex. As per the custody agreement, Landon saw his child on weekends, which they spent going to Cincinnati Reds games—Alex was a huge fan—and at one game, he caught a foul ball, barehanded. Lucy later asks her grandfather why he’d kept his first marriage, and Alex, a secret: “I had to compartmentalize my life into two existences in order to help me to heal,” he says. Back in 1975, Alex was ill; he was experiencing headaches and issues with his vision. An angiogram confirmed what Landon feared: a brain tumor. The irony of a doctor who saves children’s lives but can’t save his own son’s isn’t lost on Flerlage; in fact, he even titles a chapter “Tragic Irony,” and later, he has Landon’s ex-wife, Marilyn, say that the loss of Alex will hurt Landon the most “because he, of all people, can’t save our son.” Suffice it to say that the book lacks subtlety, and it has the sentimental tone and flavor of a film on the Hallmark Channel. That said, it also tells an unusually affecting story. Overall, this is an earnest, unpretentious book that, despite overly deliberate grabs for the heartstrings, still manages to pluck them, all the same.

A familiar tale, but one that has a melodramatic sincerity.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: 978-0-9898281-2-3

Page Count: 133

Publisher: DreamScapes Publishing Ltd

Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2019

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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SUMMER ISLAND

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LAST ORDERS

by Graham Swift ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 1996

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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.