Scan barcode
expendablemudge's review
4.0
Rating: a solid, supportive four stars of five
The Book Description: How much is a father's love worth? Jason Thibodeaux has a $42 million contract to pitch for the Colorado Rockies and a romantic bachelor lifestyle when the son he lost in a searing custody battle reappears in his life. Home, Away follows Thibodeaux's colorful rise to the pinnacle of Major League Baseball and his agonized decision to quit in the prime of his career to care for his troubled son. Their evolving relationship and resulting confrontations -— on the baseball field and off -— test the limits of loyalty and the meaning of fatherhood itself.
My Review: It's taken me *weeks* to calm down enough to write a review of this book that didn't amount to a woman-hating scream of fury at the stupidity and unfairness of a court system and a culture that privileges mothers to the exclusion of fathers.
So I don't intend to say a single word about that hugely important part of this novel. I can't be objective in the least on the topic. I limit myself to the broad observation that this is a much needed corrective to the man-bad, woman-good writing that infests family fiction like maggots infest a dead cat.
I can tell you that novels about baseball are seldom so deeply satisfying...a man who pursues his dream to become a major league pitcher, gives it up several times to be a father to his son, screws *everything* up and crawls into a bottle to stop the hurting, and then, and then--well, then a dream beyond dreaming comes true, and it's so wonderfully imagined and so movingly presented that I read the ending three times and cried each one of them.
I doubt a large number of women will read this book because it's so very honest about them, and who wants to read about *that, right? And it's got LOTS of baseball in it. That's too bad, really. But it is what it is. I am very, very glad Mr. Gillenkirk wrote this book. I truly treasured it. I hope other divorced men, baseball fans, and frustrated fathers will find it.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
The Book Description: How much is a father's love worth? Jason Thibodeaux has a $42 million contract to pitch for the Colorado Rockies and a romantic bachelor lifestyle when the son he lost in a searing custody battle reappears in his life. Home, Away follows Thibodeaux's colorful rise to the pinnacle of Major League Baseball and his agonized decision to quit in the prime of his career to care for his troubled son. Their evolving relationship and resulting confrontations -— on the baseball field and off -— test the limits of loyalty and the meaning of fatherhood itself.
My Review: It's taken me *weeks* to calm down enough to write a review of this book that didn't amount to a woman-hating scream of fury at the stupidity and unfairness of a court system and a culture that privileges mothers to the exclusion of fathers.
So I don't intend to say a single word about that hugely important part of this novel. I can't be objective in the least on the topic. I limit myself to the broad observation that this is a much needed corrective to the man-bad, woman-good writing that infests family fiction like maggots infest a dead cat.
I can tell you that novels about baseball are seldom so deeply satisfying...a man who pursues his dream to become a major league pitcher, gives it up several times to be a father to his son, screws *everything* up and crawls into a bottle to stop the hurting, and then, and then--well, then a dream beyond dreaming comes true, and it's so wonderfully imagined and so movingly presented that I read the ending three times and cried each one of them.
I doubt a large number of women will read this book because it's so very honest about them, and who wants to read about *that, right? And it's got LOTS of baseball in it. That's too bad, really. But it is what it is. I am very, very glad Mr. Gillenkirk wrote this book. I truly treasured it. I hope other divorced men, baseball fans, and frustrated fathers will find it.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
More...