A rough-hewn, underdeveloped story of college and professional athletics.
In Saulino’s sports novel, a team owner attempts to create an all-around sports celebrity for his city.
Marc Stevens is a true triple threat. The Southern Florida College senior is the star of his school’s baseball, football, and basketball teams—all at the same time. When he graduates, he’ll be a top recruit for teams and leagues across the county. He holds special appeal for self-made multimillionaire Scott Thomas, who happens to own all three of Atlanta’s major sports teams: the Braves, the Falcons, and the Hawks. Each of Scott’s general managers wants a crack at getting Marc, so Scott thinks: Why not let them all have him?: “I see a tremendous upside here,” he tells his managers. He also, in passing, off-puttingly notes that fact that Marc is White is a significant plus: “a great white athlete will have a significant impact on attendance in Atlanta,” he says. Scott launches a full-court press to bring Marc to A-Town, one that involves a complex series of draft-pick trades to position himself to nab the boy wonder. Most importantly, he’ll need to convince the young star to go along with his plan, which turns out to be easier said than done. Saulino takes his premise seriously, and he successfully dramatizes the many pieces that would have to fall into place to create a three-sport athlete. Unfortunately, most of those steps turn out to be rather uninteresting on the page, as the prose is chatty but often inelegant and wonky: “Although much of the hoopla after the game was focused on Quigley of Notre Dame, witnessing Stevens’s fifteen catches for 227 yards and three receiving touchdowns while adding an option pass for another was stuff out of the comic books for a superhero.” In addition, Scott is an intensely unpleasant protagonist. The novel attempts to portray him as funny and admirable, but readers will find few redeeming qualities in the crude, ostentatious man. Marc, for his part, is one-dimensional, and the supporting characters mostly serve as mouthpieces for bad and often profane jokes.
A rough-hewn, underdeveloped story of college and professional athletics.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5434-3883-3
Page Count: 268
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
This tender, strange treatise on getting out from the “prefab structures” of a conventional life is quintessentially July.
A woman set to embark on a cross-country road trip instead drives to a nearby motel and becomes obsessed with a local man.
According to Harris, the husband of the narrator of July’s novel, everyone in life is either a Parker or a Driver. “Drivers,” Harris says, “are able to maintain awareness and engagement even when life is boring.” The narrator knows she’s a Parker, someone who needs “a discrete task that seems impossible, something…for which they might receive applause.” For the narrator, a “semi-famous” bisexual woman in her mid-40s living in Los Angeles, this task is her art; it’s only by haphazard chance that she’s fallen into a traditional straight marriage and motherhood. When the narrator needs to be in New York for work, she decides on a solo road trip as a way of forcing herself to be more of a metaphorical Driver. She makes it all of 30 minutes when, for reasons she doesn’t quite understand, she pulls over in Monrovia. After encountering a man who wipes her windows at a gas station and then chats with her at the local diner, she checks in to a motel, where she begins an all-consuming intimacy with him. For the first time in her life, she feels truly present. But she can only pretend to travel so long before she must go home and figure out how to live the rest of a life that she—that any woman in midlife—has no map for. July’s novel is a characteristically witty, startlingly intimate take on Dante’s “In the middle of life’s journey, I found myself in a dark wood”—if the dark wood were the WebMD site for menopause and a cheap room at the Excelsior Motel.
This tender, strange treatise on getting out from the “prefab structures” of a conventional life is quintessentially July.Pub Date: May 14, 2024
ISBN: 9780593190265
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
