A sports novel offering a historical perspective.
A girl in 1970s Brooklyn gets the chance to make her future playing ball in Hill’s debut novel.
Claire Joyce loves basketball. John, one of her brothers, is a high school basketball star, though the kind of ball John and the other boys play is different from the sport available to girls like Claire—only certain “roving” players can move around the whole court in the girls’ games, and they have to wear restrictive uniforms featuring collars, skirts, and belts. Changes may be on the horizon, though: “Congress is looking at a bill that will allow girls to have equal access to sports money in federally funded programs,” John tells her. “If that passes, you might even be able to play basketball and get college funded, too.” Basketball also provides a welcome escape from life at home; Claire and her siblings contend with their alcoholic mother while their father, a cab driver, works nights and sleeps all day. Bobby, another brother, is quiet but prone to sudden acts of violence, while the gentle John increasingly gets into trouble with drugs and the law. Just as John predicted, Title IX goes into effect. Suddenly, girls’ basketball is a big deal—big enough that it might mean Claire could get a college scholarship and escape the claustrophobic environs of Irish Catholic Brooklyn. Hill’s prose is muscular and matter-of-fact, much like the maxims that govern Claire’s actions on the court: “When we’re stupid, we think our shot is the only answer. One of our exercises during official practice is to constantly pass the ball, looking for the open person…The coach always says we have to play smart. Eyes out for the open player. Hold back, measure up, break out.” The plot suffers slightly from a sense of inevitably—Claire’s path is always certain, as is John’s—which gives the pacing a somewhat torpid quality. Even so, Hill captures a watershed moment in the history of sports in a way that highlights how transformative athletics can be, especially in the lives of young women.
A sports novel offering a historical perspective.Pub Date: May 1, 2024
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 209
Publisher: manuscript
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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