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
Hokey plot, good fun.
A business executive becomes an unjustly wanted man.
Walter Nash attends his estranged father Tiberius’ funeral, where Ty’s Army buddy, Shock, rips into him for not being the kind of man the Vietnam vet Ty was. Instead, Nash is the successful head of acquisitions for Sybaritic Investments, where he earns a handsome paycheck that supports his wife, Judith, and his teenage daughter, Maggie. An FBI agent approaches Nash after the funeral and asks him to be a mole in his company, because the feds consider chief executive Rhett Temple “a criminal consorting with some very dangerous people.” It’s “a chance to be a hero,” the agent says, while admitting that Nash’s personal and financial risks are immense. Indeed, readers soon find Temple and a cohort standing over a fresh corpse and wondering what to do with it. Temple is not an especially talented executive, and he frets that his hated father, the chairman of the board, will eventually replace him with Nash. (Father-son relationships are not glorified in this tale.) Temple is cartoonishly rotten. He answers to a mysterious woman in Asia, whom he rightly fears. He kills. He beds various women including Judith, whom he tries to turn against Nash. The story’s dramatic turn follows Maggie’s kidnapping, where Nash is wrongly accused. Believing Nash’s innocence, Shock helps him change completely with intense exercise, bulking up and tattooing his body, and learning how to fight and kill. Eventually he looks nothing like the dweeb who’d once taken up tennis instead of football, much to Ty’s undying disgust. Finding the victim and the kidnappers becomes his sole mission. As a child watching his father hunt, Nash could never have killed a living thing. But with his old life over—now he will kill, and he will take any risks necessary. His transformation is implausible, though at least he’s not green like the Incredible Hulk. Loose ends abound by the end as he ignores a plea to “not get on that damn plane,” so a sequel is a necessity.
Hokey plot, good fun.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781538757987
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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