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A review by erincampbell87
The Cactus League by Emily Nemens
2.0
This book crawls along like a too-hot afternoon game.
The story focuses on the pre-season decline of an aging star outfielder, told through everyone else's eyes. Yes, it's the popular structure of separate stories held together by one character or event, and here, that's Jason Goodyear, a character whom I wish had gotten more page time and been given a deeper emotional backstory in each one of the vignettes he popped through. The idea of weaving together the many people who are effected by one man's performance is fascinating enough, but the connecting thread was never strong enough and the richly drawn character studies focused mainly on appearance and setting rather than emotional motivation or revelatory backstories. The main chapters are written in the slightly outdated style of densely packed sentences filled with facts, physical descriptors, and blunt similes rather than emotional depth. The women, especially, felt superficially sketched and lacking in complexity, which I have to admit was a little bit of an extra disappointment coming from a young woman writer. There were so many characters I wanted more from, whose stories left me curious about how they ended up where they did. The splits between the chapters, written in the voice of an anonymous reporter, were the most creative and intriguing parts of the book that made me wonder what they whole thing could have been like if truly written from the bird's eye view of an obsessive veteran sports reporter.
The story focuses on the pre-season decline of an aging star outfielder, told through everyone else's eyes. Yes, it's the popular structure of separate stories held together by one character or event, and here, that's Jason Goodyear, a character whom I wish had gotten more page time and been given a deeper emotional backstory in each one of the vignettes he popped through. The idea of weaving together the many people who are effected by one man's performance is fascinating enough, but the connecting thread was never strong enough and the richly drawn character studies focused mainly on appearance and setting rather than emotional motivation or revelatory backstories. The main chapters are written in the slightly outdated style of densely packed sentences filled with facts, physical descriptors, and blunt similes rather than emotional depth. The women, especially, felt superficially sketched and lacking in complexity, which I have to admit was a little bit of an extra disappointment coming from a young woman writer. There were so many characters I wanted more from, whose stories left me curious about how they ended up where they did. The splits between the chapters, written in the voice of an anonymous reporter, were the most creative and intriguing parts of the book that made me wonder what they whole thing could have been like if truly written from the bird's eye view of an obsessive veteran sports reporter.