A rosy, feel-good sports tale.
A YA novel tells the story of teens’ coming-of-age in a football-obsessed city.
In Green Bay, Wisconsin, football is woven into the fabric of everyday life. Senior Janus Mann, the starting quarterback of his high school football team, has run afoul of his coach and is worrying he doesn’t have what it takes to be a leader. He is still mourning his dead father and has regular telepathic conversations with Curly Lambeau, the legendary (and deceased) coach of the Green Bay Packers. “Curly often replies with a voice in my head,” narrates Janus. “And no, it’s not my imagination, if that’s what you’re thinking.” Janus isn’t the only one with problems. His crush, the flute player Asha Silver, is struggling with her alcoholic ex-boxer father. Barnaby Grayna is the son of Janus’ coach, though he doesn’t play football because his amyotrophic lateral sclerosis has confined him to a wheelchair. The main antagonist in Barnaby’s life is his effective (but disrespectful) physical therapist. The three teens work together to get out from underneath the weights in their lives—physical limitations, parental expectations, and familial histories—in order to meet adulthood on their own terms. In a town that loves football, Janus, in particular, must contend with the ghosts of the past to free himself for the future. Mancheski (Shoot for the Stars, 2014, etc.) writes in an amiable prose that captures both Janus’ voice and the mysticism inherent in old-time football. Here Janus and Asha visit Lambeau Field: “ ‘Ghosts…’ I say....The wind through the empty seats creates a low pitch, like an oboe being played a quarter-mile away. If you close your eyes it becomes a monk-like hum. ‘Of twenty million Packer fans past.’ ” The characters are endearing and well-drawn, but the novel’s plot is somewhat shaggy and meandering. The book takes a long time to get to a fairly boilerplate ending, and it could easily be 100 pages shorter. But Mancheski deftly paints adolescence in the same dreamy nostalgia as the early days of football. It may not ring completely true to readers, but it’s a pleasant enough place to spend some time.
A rosy, feel-good sports tale.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4582-2121-6
Page Count: 372
Publisher: AbbottPress
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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