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
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
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
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