An intriguing, enjoyable yarn about Ty Cobb confronting modern-day baseball.
In this novel, a baseball legend finds himself in the present day.
In the opening scene of Colton’s series opener, a tense baseball game is in progress. It won’t take readers long to figure out the game actually happened a century ago. And sure enough, Ty Cobb, the star of the Detroit Tigers, soon makes an appearance. After the game, the story’s action shifts to the present, with a man named Chase Ripley staggering drunk out onto the sidewalk at a bar’s closing time. The former college baseball prodigy is reeling from the death of his imperious father (“The only time his father ever gave him praise was when he had a perfect day at the plate”). Chase doesn’t see the car bearing down on him until it’s too late. When the tale resumes, a badly disfigured John Doe awakens in a hospital—and claims to be Ty Cobb, somehow alive again as a young man many decades after the baseball luminary’s death in 1961. As this restored Cobb recovers, he’s forced to deal with a very altered state of the world—and baseball. Colton eases his readers into this amusing premise with a good deal of narrative skill and patience. This leads to many dramatic payoffs, not the least of which is the opportunity it gives both the author and Cobb to comment on current-day baseball. At one point, Cobb muses: “It was clear that the game had changed from a contest of cunning and deception…to waiting for the circuit clout. It was now ‘boom or bust’ as nearly every batter, it seemed, was swinging from their heels, producing a proliferation of strikeouts and homeruns.” Baseball fans will likely love this kind of stuff (although some of them may disagree with the warm, appealing version of the famously unlikable Cobb presented here). And readers who aren’t aficionados of America’s national pastime will still appreciate the well-done time-travel mystery that unfolds throughout the book.
An intriguing, enjoyable yarn about Ty Cobb confronting modern-day baseball.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
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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