A meandering campus novel about finding one’s place in a crucial moment in history.
A college pitcher is caught between baseball and Nixon-era campus politics in Puszykowski’s debut novel.
John Light walked onto his baseball team at his small Michigan college suddenly in possession of an impressive fastball that had eluded him during his high school career. Now he’s in his senior year and the team has a real shot at winning the league championship. John should be excited, but he’s discontent. The philosophy and politics he’s been reading about at night—unrelated to his pharmacy major—have been exposing him to new ideas, helping him to see the flaws in America and its institutions, and he’s beginning to suspect some sort of youth-led revolutionary change might be necessary. Even though it’s 1972, conservative Wrencher College hasn’t yet felt the spirit of the 1960s. “Every year brought more long hair, more beards, more flared, torn jeans, more tie-dye, more beads, and more flannel shirts, but no groups organized to spread information or employ rebellious energy like everywhere else on the planet,” John narrates. “Wrencher was a time bubble stuck ten years in the past.” As John starts to attend peace rallies and demonstrations, he gets connected to a network of student activists, at Wrencher and elsewhere, who are willing to go to extreme lengths to make their voices heard. Meanwhile, his well-meaning coach’s efforts to secure the team the championship are undermined by the players’ antics, immaturity, and penchant for distraction. When the opportunity arises for John to put his politics into action, he must decide which rules he is willing to break, and what it will mean—for himself and for his team—when he breaks them.
Puszykowski is an adept writer, particularly about baseball. Here, John imagines a fireball moving through his body as he throws a pitch: “As I pushed forward to pitch, it rode up my thrusting thigh muscles, entered my twisting hips and into my upper torso as I opened up, shot through my pitching arm as it whipped forward, crackled through the snap of my wrist, and sparked out from my fingers as they propelled the baseball: powerful, rhythmic and fluent.” But the combination of baseball and radical campus activism makes for a sometimes overwhelming baby boomer cocktail—all 46 chapters are named for popular songs from the era, including “Bad Moon Rising,” “Instant Karma,” and “What’s Going On?” At one point, John and his catcher discuss Beatles lyrics: “I thought of how music can bring people together, like at Woodstock, ya know? That’s what this team needs, to pull together.” Puszykowski doesn’t seem to know much more than John does about what to do with this moment of cultural upheaval, failing to establish why it might be important or what any of it has to do with college baseball. The result is a narrative without much incident and a narrator too ambivalent and reserved to really carry a novel with his voice alone. The story is believable and successful at capturing a common experience of adolescence, but it is not always compelling.
A meandering campus novel about finding one’s place in a crucial moment in history.Pub Date: July 16, 2024
ISBN: 9798350956597
Page Count: 296
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
With captivating dialogue, angst-y characters, and a couple of steamy sex scenes, Hoover has done it again.
After being released from prison, a young woman tries to reconnect with her 5-year-old daughter despite having killed the girl’s father.
Kenna didn’t even know she was pregnant until after she was sent to prison for murdering her boyfriend, Scotty. When her baby girl, Diem, was born, she was forced to give custody to Scotty’s parents. Now that she’s been released, Kenna is intent on getting to know her daughter, but Scotty’s parents won’t give her a chance to tell them what really happened the night their son died. Instead, they file a restraining order preventing Kenna from so much as introducing herself to Diem. Handsome, self-assured Ledger, who was Scotty’s best friend, is another key adult in Diem’s life. He’s helping her grandparents raise her, and he too blames Kenna for Scotty’s death. Even so, there’s something about her that haunts him. Kenna feels the pull, too, and seems to be seeking Ledger out despite his judgmental behavior. As Ledger gets to know Kenna and acknowledges his attraction to her, he begins to wonder if maybe he and Scotty’s parents have judged her unfairly. Even so, Ledger is afraid that if he surrenders to his feelings, Scotty’s parents will kick him out of Diem’s life. As Kenna and Ledger continue to mourn for Scotty, they also grieve the future they cannot have with each other. Told alternatively from Kenna’s and Ledger’s perspectives, the story explores the myriad ways in which snap judgments based on partial information can derail people’s lives. Built on a foundation of death and grief, this story has an undercurrent of sadness. As usual, however, the author has created compelling characters who are magnetic and sympathetic enough to pull readers in. In addition to grief, the novel also deftly explores complex issues such as guilt, self-doubt, redemption, and forgiveness.
With captivating dialogue, angst-y characters, and a couple of steamy sex scenes, Hoover has done it again.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5420-2560-7
Page Count: 335
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.
A year in the life of the No. 2 boarding school in America—up from No. 19 last year!
Rumors of Hilderbrand’s retirement were greatly exaggerated, it turns out, since not only has she not gone out to pasture, she’s started over in high school, with her daughter Shelby Cunningham as co-author. As their delicious new book opens, it’s Move-In Day at Tiffin Academy, and Head of School Audre Robinson is warmly welcoming the returning and new students to the New England campus, the latter group including a rare midstream addition to the junior class. Brainiac Charley Hicks is transferring from public school in Maryland to a spot that opened up when one of the school’s most beloved students died by suicide the preceding year. She will be joining a large, diverse cast of adult and teenage characters—queen bees, jealous second-stringers, boozehounds young and old, secret lesbians, people chasing the wrong people chasing other wrong people—all of them royally screwed when an app called Zip Zap appears and starts blasting everyone’s secrets all over campus. How the heck…? Meanwhile, it seems so unlikely that Tiffin has jumped up to the No. 2 spot in the boarding-school rankings that a high-profile magazine launches an investigation, and even the head is worried that there may have been payola involved. The school has a reputation for being more social than academic, and this quality gets an exciting new exclamation point when the resident millionaire bad boy opens a high-style secret speakeasy for select juniors in a forgotten basement. It’s called Priorities. Exactly. One problem: Cinnamon Peters’ mysterious suicide hangs over the book in an odd way, especially since the note she left for her closest male friend is not to be opened for another year—and isn’t. This is surely a setup for a sequel, but it’s a bit frustrating here, and bobs sort of shallowly along amid the general high spirits.
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9780316567855
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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