A high school sports tale with a familiar arc and a richly rendered milieu.
In this debut novel, a young football coach puts the hopes of a West Virginia town on his shoulders.
Alderson, West Virginia, 1936. The Depression has brought its share of pain to the small, rural town, but the single greatest cause of suffering may be the fact that the local high school football team hasn’t won a game in two years. Last season, the team didn’t even score a single touchdown. Narrator Billy Shelton puts it this way: “I read an article once in a National Geographic magazine which said that every culture in the world has initiation rituals to define the moment when a boy becomes a man.…In West Virginia culture, the rite of passage which separated the men from the boys was football.” Fifteen-year-old Billy, a milk delivery boy with an ailing father, just wants a shot to prove himself on the gridiron. That shot may have just arrived in the form of the new football coach, 27-year-old Alexander Arbuckle McLaughlin. Coach, as everyone calls him, recently built a successful program elsewhere, and Billy and his teammates have hopes he can bring that magic to Alderson. But can one man really inspire a down-on-its-luck town to get back on its feet? Smith’s prose captures the language and texture of the setting. Here, Billy describes foraging for a local delicacy: “Picking Chinquapins is a tricky business, though. That’s why they aren’t grown commercially. First, you have to find them before the squirrels and birds get them. Second, the nuts are covered by a prickly bur. Getting a nut out of an unopen bur is difficult. You have to put it on the ground and roll it under your shoe.” The author includes wonderful period details, like the Farm Women’s Club setting up looms in the school’s gymnasium in order to weave rugs and blankets there during the summer. These slice-of-life moments are the book’s strongest asset, helping to sharpen what is otherwise a fairly standard and predictable sports story. Readers with ties to West Virginia may be the most suitable audience for this novel flecked with vivid local color.
A high school sports tale with a familiar arc and a richly rendered milieu.Pub Date: March 8, 2022
ISBN: 979-8429169200
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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