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mdsnyderjr's review
2.0
I have absolutely no clue how to summarize this book. It was like little short stories. A character is introduced and then you don’t hear about them ever again. This happened several times. Awful.
jhaeger's review
When I initially picked The Cactus League up I was hoping for a lot of baseball, but understood it’s a novel that needs to carry emotional resonance (and you know, is universal enough that everyone can get something out of it). The problem is I wasn’t expecting Nemens to try to jam so much story into it. At a certain point it seemed like Nemens lost sight of what her intention was. The Cactus League is a collection of short stories--some fantastic and some that didn’t quite do it for me--and in the end, I just wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be seeing or feeling.
hxvphaestion's review
3.0
3.5？
loved the portraits of different players, people & of baseball itself. found the relationship drama bland. wish there was a neater conclusion to what happens to goodyear / carver / etc
loved the portraits of different players, people & of baseball itself. found the relationship drama bland. wish there was a neater conclusion to what happens to goodyear / carver / etc
emilycc's review
3.0
I liked parts of this multi-POV story about a star left-fielder at spring training a lot, but I ultimately found it kind of lacking - stylistically showy, but also kind of empty. The more I read novels built of short stories, the less I like the form. It’s just really hard to create narrative tension. That means the author has to do something else really well, and also though there’s some great atmosphere here, it wasn’t enough to carry the book for me.
ashrocketship's review against another edition
1.0
Oh I just hated this. Deeply, brutally boring with shades of wholly unexamined misogyny, homophobia, and racism. This felt like a creative writing senior thesis that should get rightfully buried on the writer's way to (maybe) better things. It's obviously trying to say something Big and Important about the way lives are interconnected, but it barely manages to say anything even vaguely interesting and I ended up skimming the journalist passages at the start of each chapter entirely. The number of instances of "the older man" and "the rookie" I paid to read... Fifteen year olds putting up fan fiction on the internet know better. I would've really liked to read the version of this book that actually cared about its characters, the one that picked a throughline and a direction and did something useful with them, but alas.
mathteachtaco's review
4.0
3.5 stars. This book was split into nine "innings," each started with exposition from a baseball journalist, which I probably could have done without. The book read almost like a set of short stories, each intertwined and mostly centering around the great Jason Goodyear, who in his personal life may not have been so great. Characters included aspiring rookies, managers, baseball wives and women who sleep with players.
ccasavec's review against another edition
1.0
I wanted to love this book so badly. A novel about baseball, the Cactus League, no less, should absolutely be my jam. I felt like I was reading a bunch of short stories and never really knew/ cared about what was going on anyways.
yetanothersusan's review
3.0
This was a bit too much like a bunch of short stories to me. They overlapped to provide some continuity but I felt like I was missing out on what was happening to earlier characters as the baseball season progressed. Guess I could have used a few extra innings to tie everything together?