A review by ashrocketship
The Cactus League by Emily Nemens

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.