Apt characterization boosts this enlightening sports tale about the allure and perils of fame.
In this revised debut novel, an old baseball glove magically grants a Chicago boy athletic prowess—but the gift may come at too high a price.
Twelve-year-old Eddie Romano loves baseball but isn’t the best player on his team in the early 1990s. That changes when Eddie, while exploring a soon-to-be-demolished stadium, unearths a buried baseball glove. This takes him to “Dreamland,” where a coach helps him develop his skills. Sure enough, Eddie becomes a star player as years pass and he enters high school. But while he admires his literal dream coach (Billy Green, a major leaguer who once owned Eddie’s “magical glove”), the dark, unnerving figure truly giving the boy abilities is “the Manager.” He demands Eddie do horrible things, such as wish bad luck on teammates, to retain his skills. Eddie’s attitude turns sour, and, despite his flair on the field, he has no one to call a friend. But once he realizes that Billy’s spirit is the Manager’s prisoner, Eddie may give up everything to help his beloved coach escape the sinister being’s clutches. Agnello’s engaging novel, revised with Rae, showcases a morally complex young hero. For example, an enigmatic voice in Eddie’s head leads him astray while the baseball legends Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, via supernatural phone calls, offer useful advice. This spawns several relatable lessons that Eddie, with any luck, will digest, such as realizing his self-worth and following the golden rule. At the same time, a solid mystery runs throughout as readers gradually learn how Billy found himself in his terrible predicament. The authors keep the story simple, with an unadorned prose and only a handful of the large cast spotlighted. There’s likewise an understated spiritual theme, from periodic appearances by the omniscient “The Light”to speculation about who or what the chilling Manager is.
Apt characterization boosts this enlightening sports tale about the allure and perils of fame.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 410
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.
Two brothers—one a lawyer, one a chess prodigy—work through the death of their father, their complicated romantic lives, and their even more tangled relationship with each other.
Ten years separate the Koubek brothers. In his early 30s, Peter has turned his past as a university debating champ into a career as a progressive lawyer in Dublin. Ivan is just out of college, struggling to make ends meet through freelance data analysis and reckoning with his recent free fall in the world chess rankings. When their father dies of cancer, the cracks in the brothers’ relationship widen. “Complete oddball” Ivan falls in love with an older woman, an arts center employee, which freaks Peter out. Peter juggles two women at once: free-spirited college student Naomi and his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, whose life has changed drastically since a car accident left her in chronic pain. Emotional chaos abounds. Rooney has struck a satisfying blend of the things she’s best at—sensitively rendered characters, intimacies, consideration of social and philosophical issues—with newer moves. Having the book’s protagonists navigating a familial rather than romantic relationship seems a natural next step for Rooney, with her astutely empathic perception, and the sections from Peter’s point of view show Rooney pushing her style into new territory with clipped, fragmented, almost impressionistic sentences. (Peter on Sylvia: “Must wonder what he’s really here for: repentance, maybe. Bless me for I have. Not like that, he wants to tell her. Why then. Terror of solitude.”) The risk: Peter comes across as a slightly blurry character, even to himself—he’s no match for the indelible Ivan—so readers may find these sections less propulsive at best or over-stylized at worst. Overall, though, the pages still fly; the characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real.
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9780374602635
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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