An ambitious and engaging, if somewhat predictable, tale of interracial love and baseball.
In this novel, a baseball historian tracks down an old player with ties to the sport’s segregated past.
Cooperstown, New York, 1963. Frank Aldridge is an archivist—the term is less scientific than it sounds—at the Baseball Hall of Fame, combing through the yearly ephemera and memorabilia that get sent for inclusion and authentication. On this particular morning, he finds a letter in the mail pile with an unusual request. Lita Lawson of St. Louis is hoping for any information in the hall about a mostly forgotten pitcher. “It is important that I find Ray Cavanaugh,” writes Lita, “because I think he is my father. I have been looking for him a long time.” Frank wants to help Lita—he’s just learned his own wife may be pregnant, and paternity is on his mind—but there isn’t a ton of information in the archive. As Frank tells a co-worker, Cavanaugh was a powerful pitcher, earning the moniker Rock ’n Fire Ray, but he mostly played on terrible teams. Yet as Frank digs, a portrait emerges of a White baseball journeyman with a reputation for beaning batters and the Black sister of a Negro League player who find themselves in a forbidden affair. Still, a question remains: Can Frank track down the still-living Ray to connect him to his long-lost daughter? Stallard’s richly detailed prose displays a deep knowledge of the sport: “Ray was never a fan of the common pitching phrase his dad had been yelling at him for his entire baseball life….The funny thing was that Rock and Fire wasn’t even his style—his was more of a pure, steady motion with a low kick and lunge merged together as one.” With its two timelines—Ray’s career beginning in the pre-integration ’30s and Frank’s search for him in the ’60s—the book is able to explore two moments in baseball’s complex racial history, played out against the larger cultural upheavals of America. In terms of language and violence, Stallard does not shy away from the darkness of these time periods. Even so, the narrative is generally a neat one, landing in a place of reconciliation that feels perhaps slightly convenient. Still, the author weaves a believable tale that resurrects a remote era, warts and all.
An ambitious and engaging, if somewhat predictable, tale of interracial love and baseball.Pub Date: Dec. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73586-752-6
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Kaw Valley Books LLC
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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