A fine teaching tool that offers advice for getting through a golf game—and through life.
In this debut middle-grade fantasy novella, a young girl plays through an adventurous golf course that teaches her as much about herself as it does about the sport.
When 9-year-old Skyler accidentally falls into a puddle in her backyard, it transports her to an engaging fantasy world called “the Puddle Club.” The first beings that she encounters are an eager golf ball named Ralphie and an astute gopher named Par. The latter explains that the only way for Skyler to return home is to complete the local golf course, and he equips her with the necessary equipment and wisdom to do so. But despite Par’s advice to go ahead and start playing, Skyler feels the need to first stop by Practiceopolis. She’s excited by the energy in this busy “paradise golf park,” but after the workers there pressure her into buying top-notch golf equipment and practicing an absurd amount of time, she decides to go ahead and start the course. She and Ralphie make their way from hole to hole, facing obstacles such as distracting “Yip” trolls, the sandy Pit of Doom that has a mind of its own, and the dreaded Gustina, “the wind goddess of golf.” Skyler makes plenty of mistakes along the way but also learns valuable lessons, the most important of which is this: “When you’re in the game and things start to look impossible…you gotta jump right in and play through.” McGruther and Russell’s book is, in equal parts, entertaining, educational, and inspiring. They describe the scenery of the Puddle Club with delightful detail and creative wit, and the clear plot gives readers a constant sense of direction despite all of its thrilling diversions. The book is also full of vital insights for new golfers, including three simple questions to ask oneself before every hole. Many of its lessons reach far beyond the realm of golf, however, highlighting the importance of purposeful focus, the dangers of perfectionism, and the joy that can come from seeking improvement.
A fine teaching tool that offers advice for getting through a golf game—and through life.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-692-95969-5
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Hosel & Ferrule Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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