This book is filled with characters who have serious problems. Watching them all work through their problems – flailing around waiting for something better to happen to them – was not a fun experience for me to read. Just about everyone needs a serious mental evaluation, but I guess normal characters make for boring reading.
Ostensibly about baseball this book has a lot more to offer, and I enjoyed a lot about the history of each character and how they ended up in the bind that they find themselves in. It helps if you know a little about baseball, but it is written in a way that makes it unnecessary to be an expert.
It felt like the book was written recently, with a contemporary vibe that seemed fresh and up to date. People are using smartphones, and the liberal college where things take place feels about the appropriate level of liberal for the United States five years ago.
But since everyone is broken it gets a little hard to get behind the characters as they make mistake after mistake. It is a long book, too – maybe it could have been trimmed down a bit. Possibly it was written with the potential of a TV drama deal in mind.
This one showed promise, but in the end wasn’t really for me. Next I am reading Inside the Box by David Epstein.
