NEVER SO GREEN

This ambitious debut shows a skillful hand with prose in its depiction of the pivotal role sports can play in the life of an adolescent boy, but it fails to convey the complexities of incest, its other major plot element. Twelve-year-old “Tex” Donleavy initially dislikes Farley, his new stepfather, a high school baseball coach. But over the summer, Farley and his daughter Jack, named for Jackie Robinson, help Tex to master baseball, despite his deformed hand, and to feel socially at ease on Farley’s Little League team. On the last page, Tex reflects that Farley and Jack “not only made him a ballplayer, they’d made him whole.” He then regrets having revealed to his father that he saw Farley sexually abusing Jack, incest that had been going on for years. Tex’s misgivings, voiced the day after witnessing Farley masturbate as he stroked his 12-year-old daughter, show an emotional distancing from the incest characteristic of everyone involved. By keeping close to Tex’s confused view, the narrative largely ignores the painful psychological impact of incest on Jack. Tex’s father, an upright small-town lawyer, intervenes in the situation with a muddled discourse on sexual abuse laws and a tidy plan to help Farley avoid criminal consequences and keep his daughter. Earlier scenes in which Tex takes Jack to watch his father defend a man accused of “date rape,” Jack lets schoolmates feel her breasts, and Tex lusts after his father’s girlfriend seem contrived to emphasize Tex’s confusion about sexual matters and morality. Readers who are emotionally equipped to fill in the gaps about incest and its effects are probably unlikely to pick up a book about a 12-year-old baseball player. (Fiction. YA)