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A review by rpych2
The Cactus League by Emily Nemens
2.0
I really wanted to like this book more, because I’m a huge baseball fan and I love character driven stories. And I liked the idea of splitting up the novel into nine innings that would be chapters, but it felt disjointed at times and more like a short story collection set in the same setting at times. Like the 30 pages about the baseball wives that didn’t actually focus on anyone’s POV or connect to the story in the slightest, I’m still struggling to understand why that was included.
There were some good characters in the story, but for the most part they were all just bad people who had comically large flaws, because there couldn’t be a character that was just decent or dealing with smaller things in their lives. But my biggest complaint was the ending, which was horrible. There was no resolution at all, it just sort of ends. I understand that it’s more about the characters than the plot, but none of the characters had any resolution to their stories either. It made it seem like there wasn’t actually a point to anything that happened in the story, because we don’t get to see how the characters change or are affected by their actions. It’s 1.5 or 2 stars for me because I did like the spring training backdrop and some of the stories were okay, but for the most part I didn’t like this one.
There were some good characters in the story, but for the most part they were all just bad people who had comically large flaws, because there couldn’t be a character that was just decent or dealing with smaller things in their lives. But my biggest complaint was the ending, which was horrible. There was no resolution at all, it just sort of ends. I understand that it’s more about the characters than the plot, but none of the characters had any resolution to their stories either. It made it seem like there wasn’t actually a point to anything that happened in the story, because we don’t get to see how the characters change or are affected by their actions. It’s 1.5 or 2 stars for me because I did like the spring training backdrop and some of the stories were okay, but for the most part I didn’t like this one.