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
BOOK TO SCREEN
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
© Copyright 2026 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.
