Garfield, Henry. Tartabull's throw.Simon & Schuster Simon & Schuster U.S. publishing company. It was founded in 1924 by Richard L. Simon (1899–1960) and M. Lincoln Schuster (1897–1970), whose initial project, the original crossword-puzzle book, was a best-seller. , Pulse. 284p. c2001. 0-699-85671-7. $5.99. SA To quote from the review of the hardcover in KLIATT, May 2001 : In August of 1967, 19-year-old aspiring baseball player Cyrus Nygerski feels like his career is already over. He has just been fired from a minor league team in Beloit, Wisconsin Beloit is a city located in Rock County, Wisconsin. As of the 2000 census, the city had a total population of 35,775. Beloit is the location of Beloit College. Beloit is home to a Hormel plant, the world's largest can of chili [1], and the Beloit Snappers baseball club , and as he dejectedly de·ject·ed adj. Being in low spirits; depressed. See Synonyms at depressed. de·ject  ed·ly adv. heads home by bus to Boston he meets a beautiful young woman from Maine named Cassandra, who seems strangely familiar to him. They get off together in Chicago to see a Red Sox game--this is the summer of the team's famous pennant race. Cassandra disappears before the end of the game, and Cyrus decides to go to Maine to find her. That's Part One--but Part Two, set in Maine in April of 1967 and narrated by Cassandra's 10-year-old brother, tells a different version of events. In this telling, Cassandra and Cyrus first meet in New York New York, state, United StatesNew York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of and go to Maine to visit her family. There Cyrus hears the story of nearby Howley's Hole, a mysteriously deep part of an otherwise shallow cove. The hole is a time portal--those who enter it, and survive, can go back in time and alter events. Strange, gory go·ry adj. go·ri·er, go·ri·est 1. Covered or stained with gore; bloody. 2. Full of or characterized by bloodshed and violence. killings pop up here and there, and Cyrus and Cassandra go to New York, where Cassandra tries to kill an old boyfriend she suspects is a werewolf werewolf: see lycanthropy. werewolf In European folklore, a man who changes into a wolf at night and devours animals, people, or corpses, returning to human form by day. causing these deaths. They also attend a Red Sox game there. That summer, Cyrus has a terrific season with the minor league team (unlike events in the first part of the book), and is called up to the White Sox--but the husband of the woman he's been having an affair with in Beloit is out to get Cyrus, and after Cyrus's first game with the White Sox in Chicago, in which a player named Tartabull makes a famous throw, the husband stabs Cyrus. It is this event that Cassandra has gone back through the time portal to prevent, it emerges at the end--and she and Cyrus are revealed to be werewolves, as a result of battling and being bitten by other werewolves. This werewolf angle explains the strange deaths. This ambitious mix of baseball history, time portal adventure, and werewolf tale sounds confusing, but it will hold readers' interest, and the characters, especially Cyrus, are appealing. The detailed descriptions of baseball games will appeal to fans, and there is plenty of suspense. This is a prequel pre·quel n. A literary, dramatic, or cinematic work whose narrative takes place before that of a preexisting work or a sequel. [pre- + (se)quel.] to the author's other books about Cyrus "Moondog" Nygersky, Room 13 and Moondog, but it can easily stand alone. Some profanities. |
|
||||||||||||||||||
Printer friendly
Cite/link
Email
Feedback
Reader Opinion