notanotherbookreview

There are books that confound their genre and The Prince of Orange County  (Pelekinesis) is not a formulaic  "coming of age" story but one that redefines the idea of what that means. From "Catcher in the Rye" you get  the bittersweet end of childhood fantasy lost in the torturous crucible of adolescence, with "Huck Finn" you do have a similar awakening to adventure and life, and you hope the hero will come to terms with the adult world. In The Prince of Orange County, the hero, at age thirteen, is already living a dream that just may happen. Thomas Kabiri's "got game," meaning BASKETBALL, and is already playing with the big boys at his local playground court in southern California in 1986.  He can steal that ball and shoot and sling the "BS" with the other mavens in the local park. But it's not idle talk that his precocious skills might land him in the big-time--if he plays his cards right and grows to be more than 5...

American Boy by Larry Watson, August 2012, Milkweed Editions Matthew Garth, the 17 year old narrator of AMERICAN BOY, is a hard-scrabble not quite hard-boiled boy in the early 1960’s in Willow Creek, an isolated town in Minnesota. Families here have known each other for generations and newcomers, like the charismatic Dr. Dunbar, are both admired and viewed with suspicion. Raised by a struggling widow, Matt’s from the “wrong side of the tracks,” grateful for his status, as an unofficial member of the Dunbar family. And like a Dreiser hero, he knows it’s strangely provisional. His friendship with Johnny Dunbar gives him access to the luxurious Victorian house, holiday parties, but most of all to the charismatic Dr. Dunbar. When Matt’s father died, the pain of that event was muted by Dunbar, who credited him with enough intelligence to be able to understand the medical causes. Flattered that Dr. Dunbar encourages him, as a future physician, Matt considers his comfortable pl...

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach, is a coming of age sports novel that transcends the category. It has been praised by almost every major critic in every possible publication. I mostly join that chorus. I like the gentle humor in this book, the sly homage to Melville's Moby Dick, the empathy aroused by his characters, the sure plotting that unhurriedly moves the story to an ending that's unexpected. Harbach's inarticulate hero, Henry Skrimshander is a great surprise, a ball-player stand-in for the artist as mystic. Henry's an outsider. He's the kind of visionary who's uncompromising, self-sacrificing and, for a short-stop, ungrounded in planet earth. Like a Sam Shepard hero, he comes from the obscure West, Lankton, South Dakota, with working class parents, and few aspirations but one. From the age of 9, when he got his glove with Aparico Rodrigues inscribed on it, he wanted to play shortstop like the famous player, whose book, "The Art of Fielding...