A review by andrew61
The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach

4.0

I really enjoyed this story of baseball and relationships in a Wisconsin university. The plot is based around five principal characters. It begins with Henry skrimshander a teenage boy playing baseball in a small town against a college team. Henry turns out to be a brilliant shortstop fielder and one of the college team Mike Schwartz charms him and his family in allowing him to take a scholarship at the college. When he arrives his roomate is Owen a gay brilliant academic who is also a good baseball player. The other two characters are head of college Guert Affenlight and his daughter Pella. Henry soon captures the attention of the major league teams but an event occurs which impacts on the lives of all five as their futures become intertwined. As in many good American novels this book has the ability to create a family of its characters whose lives the reader becomes deeply immersed in, I rapidly turned the pages anxious to know what happened next. It didn't matter that I had no idea about what or how a baseball game works because there was a tension in the narrative which meant I was hooked. The writer also created a sense of place and I could easily see Henry, and Owen wandering the college in a Wisconsin dominated by the great lakes. I know that many readers may baulk at some of the resolution of the book but sometimes in a book you want to come away feeling that all is right in the world you have immersed yourself in and I was sorry to put the book down and lose the interaction I had enjoyed with the characters. Good escapism and well worth the journey. It is also interesting to wonder why baseball seems to lend itself to good fiction when other sports don't work as well.