Category: Books

Quirky isn’t usually my thing, and Annie Hartnett’s latest novel, The Road to Tender Hearts, is most decidedly quirky (just ask Pancakes, the death-predicting cat). The events are bizarre and often tragic, and the characters are eccentric. But at the core of this novel, there is a warmth and genuineness that breaks through its comically dark outer layer.

The story starts with a slew of those bizarre events that ultimately unite main character PJ Halliday, a 63-year-old lottery winner with a long history of drinking and letting people down, with his estranged brother’s young grandchildren, Luna and Ollie.

PJ is not about to let their sudden existence in his life stop him from his latest endeavor, a road trip from his home in Massachusetts to the Tender Hearts Retirement Community in Arizona, where he plans to woo his high-school crush, recently single again after losing her spouse. (PJ learns about that in the newspaper obits, not because he’s been in contact with her, so this visit will be a fun surprise for her.)

Also joining the trip, begrudgingly, is PJ’s 20-something daughter, Sophie, who is simmering with decades’ worth of anger toward her often absent alcoholic father. She has been tasked by her mother — PJ’s ex-wife, Ivy — to take care of him while she is away in Alaska with her fiance, Fred. So Sophie feels obligated to act as babysitter, for Ollie and Luna, and also for her dad.

The motley road-trip crew is rounded out by Pancakes, who has recently wandered into PJ’s life after a stint as a therapy cat at a nursing home.

If PJ were written in any other way, I think I would have hated him as a character. But somehow Hartnett makes me want to root for him. He, pitifully, thinks of Ivy and Fred as his best friends. He goes to their house for breakfast every morning, and he’s devastated when they don’t invite him on their trip.

When Ivy and Fred leave, PJ decides to quit drinking, again.

“PJ had never had a detox as bad as that one, not even when he had to go to prison for six weeks for the drunk driving, but once the detoxing was over, PJ had a new outlook. … When Ivy and Fred got home in September, he could be a new man. He wanted to be a man who was worthy of being their best man. Without the booze, PJ started feeling hopeful.”

It’s kind of hard not to feel for an old man who is so lonely and accepting of his own faults that he settles for being the third wheel in his ex-wife’s relationship. He’s lived his fair share of tragic events, too, which we start to learn more about as the road trip gets underway.

But for every moment or memory of darkness, there is also light, in the form of sweet moments between characters, hope for better things to come and the perfect amount of well-placed fatalistic humor.

Take, for instance, when Pancakes jumps out of a window of the moving car as Sophie and the kids try to track down a missing PJ. Ollie comments that Pancakes is “suicidal without Uncle PJ.” In fact, Pancakes is pulling a Lassie, leading the crew to PJ, who had been hit by a car while walking back to the motel from a bar after having just one drink and deciding he needed to go back to his family. The car was driven, ironically, by the man he’d been chatting with in the bar whose sad story was that he’d killed his wife when driving drunk. PJ survives the accident with minor injuries, but the man does not.

Emotions run high throughout the trip, as PJ battles his own inner demons, Sophie grapples with her dad’s still-not-great behavior and the kids adjust to their new reality as orphans — although Luna is having none of that. She is convinced her real dad is a famous actor who used to live in their town and whom her mom had always said she’d briefly dated. Luna wants to track him down and make him take a paternity test. This would get PJ off the hook as guardian, so he agrees to veer off course for Luna’s heartbreaking endeavor to find a family.

It’s all very sad, but also funny and genuine. The story could have been depressing, but it’s not. The characters are all well-developed and unique, and PJ’s growth feels honest and real. He’s somehow a loveable underdog, despite his constant lapses in judgment.

The Tender Hearts the title is referring to, presumably, is Tender Hearts Retirement Community, as they are literally on the road driving to that destination. But The Road to Tender Hearts could also describe the path PJ is taking to rebuild his heart with compassion and empathy. It could be the softening of Sophie’s heart as she sees her dad trying to be better and do better. It could be the unwitting journey PJ is taking into Ollie and Luna’s tender hearts.

I’m glad I didn’t let my thoughts of “this is so weird” as I read the first few pages stop me from taking this journey with them. A-

Featured Photo: The Road To Tender Hearts by Annie Hartnett

Madeline Hill wasn’t looking to expand her family when a stranger in a PT Cruiser pulled up to her farm stand in Tennessee and announced that he was her half-brother. At 32, she’d settled into a life she’d built with her mother after her father left them 20 years earlier with no explanation and no future contact. Maybe it wasn’t her best life, but it also wasn’t a bad one. They ran an organic farm that had won acclaim for their meat, eggs, produce and cheese, and had even been featured in magazines. True, it was a largely solitary life, but Mad, as she was known, was comfortable in it. A sibling was not part of her life plan.

Enter Reuben Hill, or Rube, as he is known. The stranger in the PT Cruiser tells Mad that they shared a father, and he had a whole other life in Boston before he ran out on Rube’s family and took up with Mad’s mom. As an adult, Rube wanted to learn more about his father, and so he hired a private investigator who found a mysterious pattern: The man that Rube knew as Chuck Hill, a New England insurance salesman and author of detective novels, had reinvented himself as Charles Hill, a organic farmer in the deep South. But he hadn’t stopped there. There were, apparently, other families that their dad created and left.

In another writer’s hands, this storyline might be overwrought, but in the hands of Kevin Wilson, it’s comedy gold. In Run for the Hills, Wilson’s sixth novel, he sends Mad and Rube on the world’s weirdest road trip, in which they trace their father’s domestic settlements from Tennessee to California and meet their other half-siblings, in the hopes of figuring out what, exactly, their father was thinking, as he continually reinvented himself at the expense of others.

It’s an absurd story, as absurd as the PT Cruiser that Rube showed up in for a road trip. (It’s what the rental-car company gave him, he explains to a bemused Mad.) But it has a raw and poignant center — how this man had shaped his children’s lives, not by his presence, but by his absence, as Wilson writes.

Mad and Rube had built successful lives for themselves, despite the trauma that their father’s abrupt disappearance had inflicted upon their families; Rube had even followed in his father’s footsteps, becoming a mystery writer. Another sibling that they tracked down was a star college basketball — in the iteration of himself that the father gave that family, he had been a basketball coach who went by the name Chip Hill.

Curiously, despite the coldness of his departures, when he was living with the families their father was, by all accounts, a good father. Which made his willingness to abruptly remove himself from his children’s lives all the more a mystery.

What caused him to behave that way — and where he is now — are the central questions driving the narrative of Run for the Hills, but it’s the blooming relationships between the quirky half-siblings that give the story its heart. Mad at first is suspicious of Rube and his motives, and reluctant to even invite him into her house as a guest. Guests, she thinks, are an inconvenience: “They showed up and created work for you. They asked about your feelings, your day. They asked if maybe you had a beer in the fridge.They asked if you could adjust the air-conditioning just, like, two degrees. They asked if you knew the location of any legal papers that might speak to the true identity of the father you had not seen in over twenty years.”

Rube, whose mother recently died, is an excruciatingly polite and lonely man who wears his longing for a family on his Oxford shirt sleeve. He is gay and has been in relationships, but like Mad, had never married and is afraid of being left again. “Half of it is that Dad messed me up by leaving. And half of it is that my mom messed me up by staying but being so damn sad that I never forgot about it,” he tells Mad. He is hoping that he can make some lasting connection with these half-siblings, while Mad is hoping just to figure out the mystery and get home to her real life as soon as possible.

They track down the third child, Pepper (who goes by Pep — their father was very fond of nicknames) at the University of Oklahoma, where she was about to play in a championship game. Then it’s off to find a son in Salt Lake City, before the crowded car ultimately crosses into California, where they hope to find the father of them all.

Interspersed throughout the novel are descriptions of video the father had taken of all the children — Pep playing basketball, Mad feeding chickens, Rube playing with a paper airplane. The interludes are meant to show us Hill’s loving interactions with his children, adding to the mystery, and their meaning is more clear near the end of the book. But they don’t work — they are distractions to the natural flow of the story. As is Wilson’s inexplicable fondness for the word “offered” as a synonym for “said.” There are more offerings in this book than at a tent revival in the deep South.

But these are small quibbles with a genuinely fun novel that strikes the right balance between poignancy and comedy, no small task given the subject matter. Wilson has famously written about family dysfunction in his other novels, which include The Family Fang (made into a movie), Nothing to See Here and Now is Not the Time to Panic. If Hollywood options this too, I’ll be at the theater on opening day. A- —Jennifer Graham

Featured Photo: Morgenstern’s Finest Ice Cream, by Nicholas Morgenstern

Madeline Hill wasn’t looking to expand her family when a stranger in a PT Cruiser pulled up to her farm stand in Tennessee and announced that he was her half-brother. At 32, she’d settled into a life she’d built with her mother after her father left them 20 years earlier with no explanation and no future contact. Maybe it wasn’t her best life, but it also wasn’t a bad one. They ran an organic farm that had won acclaim for their meat, eggs, produce and cheese, and had even been featured in magazines. True, it was a largely solitary life, but Mad, as she was known, was comfortable in it. A sibling was not part of her life plan.

Enter Reuben Hill, or Rube, as he is known. The stranger in the PT Cruiser tells Mad that they shared a father, and he had a whole other life in Boston before he ran out on Rube’s family and took up with Mad’s mom. As an adult, Rube wanted to learn more about his father, and so he hired a private investigator who found a mysterious pattern: The man that Rube knew as Chuck Hill, a New England insurance salesman and author of detective novels, had reinvented himself as Charles Hill, a organic farmer in the deep South. But he hadn’t stopped there. There were, apparently, other families that their dad created and left.

In another writer’s hands, this storyline might be overwrought, but in the hands of Kevin Wilson, it’s comedy gold. In Run for the Hills, Wilson’s sixth novel, he sends Mad and Rube on the world’s weirdest road trip, in which they trace their father’s domestic settlements from Tennessee to California and meet their other half-siblings, in the hopes of figuring out what, exactly, their father was thinking, as he continually reinvented himself at the expense of others.

It’s an absurd story, as absurd as the PT Cruiser that Rube showed up in for a road trip. (It’s what the rental-car company gave him, he explains to a bemused Mad.) But it has a raw and poignant center — how this man had shaped his children’s lives, not by his presence, but by his absence, as Wilson writes.

Mad and Rube had built successful lives for themselves, despite the trauma that their father’s abrupt disappearance had inflicted upon their families; Rube had even followed in his father’s footsteps, becoming a mystery writer. Another sibling that they tracked down was a star college basketball — in the iteration of himself that the father gave that family, he had been a basketball coach who went by the name Chip Hill.

Curiously, despite the coldness of his departures, when he was living with the families their father was, by all accounts, a good father. Which made his willingness to abruptly remove himself from his children’s lives all the more a mystery.

What caused him to behave that way — and where he is now — are the central questions driving the narrative of Run for the Hills, but it’s the blooming relationships between the quirky half-siblings that give the story its heart. Mad at first is suspicious of Rube and his motives, and reluctant to even invite him into her house as a guest. Guests, she thinks, are an inconvenience: “They showed up and created work for you. They asked about your feelings, your day. They asked if maybe you had a beer in the fridge.They asked if you could adjust the air-conditioning just, like, two degrees. They asked if you knew the location of any legal papers that might speak to the true identity of the father you had not seen in over twenty years.”

Rube, whose mother recently died, is an excruciatingly polite and lonely man who wears his longing for a family on his Oxford shirt sleeve. He is gay and has been in relationships, but like Mad, had never married and is afraid of being left again. “Half of it is that Dad messed me up by leaving. And half of it is that my mom messed me up by staying but being so damn sad that I never forgot about it,” he tells Mad. He is hoping that he can make some lasting connection with these half-siblings, while Mad is hoping just to figure out the mystery and get home to her real life as soon as possible.

They track down the third child, Pepper (who goes by Pep — their father was very fond of nicknames) at the University of Oklahoma, where she was about to play in a championship game. Then it’s off to find a son in Salt Lake City, before the crowded car ultimately crosses into California, where they hope to find the father of them all.

Interspersed throughout the novel are descriptions of video the father had taken of all the children — Pep playing basketball, Mad feeding chickens, Rube playing with a paper airplane. The interludes are meant to show us Hill’s loving interactions with his children, adding to the mystery, and their meaning is more clear near the end of the book. But they don’t work — they are distractions to the natural flow of the story. As is Wilson’s inexplicable fondness for the word “offered” as a synonym for “said.” There are more offerings in this book than at a tent revival in the deep South.

But these are small quibbles with a genuinely fun novel that strikes the right balance between poignancy and comedy, no small task given the subject matter. Wilson has famously written about family dysfunction in his other novels, which include The Family Fang (made into a movie), Nothing to See Here and Now is Not the Time to Panic. If Hollywood options this too, I’ll be at the theater on opening day. A- —Jennifer Graham

Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry (Berkley, 432 pages)

Cracking open a new Emily Henry novel is like settling into a beach chair, soaking up the warmth of the sun as you sink your feet into the cool sand and savor the moment of calm, unbothered bliss. And then it’s better than that, knowing you’ll be in this state of bliss for as long as the story lasts, rather than for a few minutes before the sun gets too hot and you start sweating and wishing you’d brought an umbrella.

That’s the experience I’ve had with all of Henry’s novels, and Great Big Beautiful Life was no exception — at first. That initial feeling of euphoria was real; as always, Henry’s engaging writing drew me right in and I was totally on board with the story, of two writers vying for a job to write the biography of a reclusive heiress who disappeared years ago following a series of tragedies and a lifetime of public scrutiny.

I love the premise. I’m a fan of the novel’s protagonist, Alice, a serial optimist, and her rival/love interest, Hayden, a serial pessimist. I even liked Margaret Ives, the mysterious octogenarian heiress.

So I was all in, at first, for Henry’s departure from her typical rom-com. But then the sun got too hot, so to speak. Because just as Alice and Hayden’s romance starts to heat up, Margaret’s telling of her “juicy” life story takes over and the focus shifts to her extensive family history.

And I do mean extensive. Even Alice notes some frustration when Margaret starts her story several generations back, rather than diving into the more recent past.

I already don’t love the story-within-a-story framework, because I almost always like one story more and feel antsy when I’m reading the “other” story, waiting to get back to the good stuff. In this case, I was by far more interested in Alice and Hayden. I loved their interactions and wanted more of them, to watch their relationship develop more explicitly.

Margaret’s family’s decades of secrets and deceptions? I really wanted to care, but it all felt so convoluted. I kept forgetting who was related to whom and in what way. And the element of mystery that permeates the Ives’ family history, that presumably the general public cares enough about to read a Margaret Ives biography, isn’t all that exciting.

I was hoping when we got to Margaret’s hyped-up romance with another briefly famous person, Cosmo, there would be similar vibes to Alice and Hayden’s story. But even that fell flat for me.

I truly believe that the cover of Great Big Beautiful Life is a disservice to what the novel actually is: more “women’s fiction” than rom-com. Every time I picked the book up, I could not align the cover image with the words inside — but only if I was on a Margaret chapter. The Alice/Hayden plot fit the cover perfectly. It’s like Henry wanted to try something more serious but also didn’t want to let go of the genre she does best, ultimately creating a disjointed reading experience.

All that being said, Emily Henry’s writing is so lovely, and I appreciate her attempt to step out of her comfort zone. I can’t help wondering, if Henry had written a book solely about the Ives family — and marketed it accurately, as women’s fiction rather than a rom-com — whether I would have been more invested, knowing that I’d be reading a historical family saga.

Likewise, I think Alice and Hayden’s story has more to offer, both their relationship and their individual stories. Alice as a character is refreshing in that she is so positive in a way that could be annoying but somehow is not. Hayden is the grumpy male character that’s been written plenty of times before, but there’s something about him that seems sincere from the beginning and more real than the average grump-turned-lover rom-com character. They also both have intriguing pasts that could have used more fleshing out.

Great Big Beautiful Life is two mostly good stories that just don’t mesh well. But it’s still worth the read. Henry’s writing is a warm hug, no matter what she’s writing about, so as long as you’re not expecting straight-up rom-com vibes, this is a few hours well spent. B —Meghan Siegler

The Art of Winning, by Bill Belichick (Avid Reader Press, 289 pages)

It is challenging to approach Bill Belichick’s new book on its literary merits, considering all the news coverage given its publicity tour (sample from the Washington Post: “Bill Belichick, Jordan Hudson and the making of a PR disaster”). There is also the matter of the acknowledgments.

Let’s just say that when the author thanks 4½ pages of people, and the media focuses on one person he does not thank, it’s fair to wonder if anyone is interested in the actual book, except for maybe Tom Brady, who promises in a cover blurb that The Art of Winning will bring out the best in all of us. And who, besides Robert Kraft, doesn’t want that?

So I began the book with an open mind, right up to the point where Belichick started yelling at me.

I’m not sure whose idea it was to, at the end of each chapter, have two pages of all-caps commands barking at the reader in white type on black pages, but it is shocking the first time you come across it, and each subsequent time it’s just annoying. (Wondering if I was overreacting, I showed a couple of pages to my college-age daughter and said, “Don’t read the words, just tell me how you react to this.” She didn’t know anything about the book or author. “Scared,” she said.)

This effect is not mitigated even when Belichick is screaming at us on the page to “TREAT PEOPLE WITH KINDNESS, RESPECT, AND DIGNITY WHENEVER YOU ARE MAKING A DECISION THAT INVOLVES THEIR LIFE OUTSIDE OF WORK.” Or “HONESTY IS GOOD. THERE IS A PLACE FOR SPEAKING SOFTLY, AND A PLACE FOR SPEAKING FORCEFULLY.”

OK, Yoda.

This is, at times, a book of platitudes, albeit platitudes written down by the winningest coach in football when he was between jobs. We were warned of that by the title, which is not especially original. (See: Amazon.)

That is not to say that there are not interesting stories in the book; there are plenty, including one involving the bromance that developed between Tom Brady and Antonio Brown when the troubled wide receiver was a New England Patriot for 13 days in 2019. Belichick reveals that AB sent TB12 a gift of bison and some sort of special milk that was $500 a bottle and was shipped in from the West. Though nobody apparently was at fault, it got left outside Brady’s locker for a night, and as Belichick tells it, on the eve of a big game, “we were all crying over spoiled milk” and management wound up reimbursing Brown $3,500.

“Think about it this way: Would you spend $3500 to ensure the best person on your team gave their best performance when it mattered most? Would you pay twice that to immediately relieve your star employee of a depressive episode, no matter how head-shaking? Absolutely, and you know it. Your job is not to psychoanalyze. Your job is to put people in a position to win.”

Anybody who followed the Patriots under Belichick for even a few years recognizes the patterns he lays out here. Practice matters. So does consistency. The process is king. (“Every day does not revolve around closing a big deal or scoring a big new client. But those days when the stakes are very high should feel exactly like every other day.”) All this is fine, and yes, might be helpful to some. There are worse self-help books out there, for sure.

It’s just we can’t help thinking, is this really all he’s got for us?

Like a Belichick press conference, even the big stories seem brusque. This is disappointing, especially when he begins with a line like “Falcons fans, you have fair warning. I’m going to talk about 28-3.”

That refers, of course, to the 2017 Super Bowl when the Falcons led by that score in the third quarter. The Pats went on to score 31 unanswered points. Surely, this will be a great story? Nope. It’s one page describing one play; then he’s on to the importance of preparation. (PREPARATION IS NEVER WASTED, REGARDLESS OF OUTCOME.)

Also, he never even tells us what animal or plant that ridiculous $500 milk came from.

He does give us some insight into the men who were influential in his life, including father Steve Belichick, who was also a football coach and a scout and passed on to his son the importance of working every day, not just to get a paycheck or even to win football games, but to improve at everything. (“Am I working toward something? Or am I just working?”)

“I suspect that the quest for improvement is not not quite so ubiquitous in the world outside sports,” Belichick writes, explaining how being laser focused on improvement is the crux of his famous phrase “On to Cincinnati,” which was uttered after a tough loss to the Kansas City Chiefs on Monday Night Football.

To be fair, there are some parts to this book that are genuinely funny, including Belichick’s “free motivation trick” involving Rob Gronkowski: “Whenever you feel lazy, close your eyes and imagine Gronk walking into your office and swatting you aside and taking your job. What’s he doing? How hard is he doing it? Does he seem depressed to be working hard? Or did he just spike your coffee mug on your head after sending that email you were too overwhelmed to type?”

He also tells a couple of revealing Tom Brady stories, which help to explain why Brady was so magnanimous in the blurb.

The Art of Winning is insider baseball, so to speak, in that the Gronkowski story means nothing at all to anyone who knows nothing about Gronk. Many of Belichick’s stories won’t mean much to anybody who doesn’t speak football, and they will appeal even less to anyone who doesn’t love the New England Patriots (meaning much of the country). As inspirational books go, even at its best, it’s self-limiting in its reach. And Jeff Benedict and Michael Holloway have written more engagingly about the Patriots.

So the greatest coach of all time (which actually remains to be seen — we’ll see how he does in North Carolina) isn’t the greatest writer of all time, nor should we expect him to be. It’s just Belichick on paper: Billy GOAT Gruff. C

Homestand, by Will Bardenwerper (Doubleday, 301 pages)

Batavia is a small city in western New York that most people have never heard of, even if they pass it on the New York Thruway on the way to or from a vacation. Like a lot of cities its size, Batavia is remarkable mostly for its reasonably priced homes and comforting sense of community, the latter of which is often derived from sports.

In Homestand, Will Bardenwerper examines what happens when that sense of community is under threat — in Batavia’s case, when the city loses its minor-league baseball team when the MLB decides to scale down its farm teams. It’s a topic that is close to the author’s heart, his warmest childhood memories involving backyard baseball with his brother, under his grandfather’s watch, and his adult experience of being part of a tightly knit Army battalion deployed to Iraq after 9/11.

When he returned home, Bardenwerper writes, “… after those many months living as a member of a small tribe who did everything together, I couldn’t wrap my head around what the ‘real’ world looked like when I returned, face-to-face, real human interactions increasingly giving way to soulless virtual contact.”

Increasingly concerned about how disconnected Americans are becoming from each other, he was also troubled by what was happening economically, with private equity becoming more of a player in everything from housing to baseball. When Major League Baseball restructured the minor leagues in 2021, cutting 40 teams, Bardenwerper saw it through this lens: What the loss of a team would mean for a place like Batavia, where community life was heavily invested in its beloved team, the Muckdogs.

Batavia, however, didn’t go gently into a baseball-less night. It got a new team to play in Dwyer Stadium, one composed of college players who each paid $1,500 for the opportunity to sharpen their skills while enjoying an enthusiastic, ready-made fan base. Bardenwerper decided to join their ranks in the name of journalism, buying a season ticket and traveling from his home in Pennsylvania to embed himself for a season in Muckdogmania.

“I wanted to find out for myself what we, as a country, risked losing, and whether there was any chance it might be saved,” he writes.

Much of the book is structured by games: the Muckdogs versus, say, the Elmira Pioneers, the Syracuse Salt Cats, the Utica Blue Sox and, my personal favorite, Jamestown Tarp Skunks, which honestly makes me want to move to Jamestown, New York, just because, well, Tarp Skunks.

It is an interesting scaffolding for the book, which works except for the fact that, like baseball itself, this narrative lends itself to plodding. Bardenwerper takes us deep into the life of this community and its inhabitants, sometimes deeper that the reader wants to go. We are warned of this at the start of the book, when a list of “Dramatis Personae” tells us that the people we are about to meet include octogenarian season ticket holder Dr. Ross Fanara; Bob Brinks, the popcorn maker at the Elmira stadium’s concessions stand; and Ernie Lawrence, “musician, hospice volunteer, rosary maker.”

Let’s just say that by the end of Homestand you will know a lot about small towns in the Empire State and their inhabitants. And also about why baseball is so important in small-town America.

Coming together to cheer on a team, Bardenwerper writes, makes everyone’s life a bit better at the moment. “The real magic,” he says, is not happening in the diamond, no matter how exciting a game may be, but “found in the bleachers, among the fans.”

This is a romanticized notion of fandom, to be sure; sometimes fans are falling from the stands, ripping balls out of a player’s mitt, throwing things on the field. But to know and love a community is to have spent time in it and gotten to know its people through shared experiences. As a local author (and fellow season ticket holder) that Bardenwerper got to know in the stands, Bill Kauffman, wrote of Batavia, “This is such an unlovely place, yet I love it with all my heart. To visitors, it is a charmless Thruway stop on the Rust Belt’s fringe; to me, it is the stuff of myth and poetry, and of life weighed on the human scale — the only measurement that counts.”

While Homestand is a love letter to community and to baseball, it has its villains: the money counters in MLB, private equity companies that profit at the expense of ordinary Americans, and, increasingly of concern to Bardenwerper, the extraordinarily well-paid professional ballplayer.

At one event in which children with disabilities were playing ball with the Muckdogs, causing everyone around to swell with emotion, Bardenwerper started thinking about how “just a few hundred miles to the southeast, the New York Yankees’ Gerrit Cole would soon go to work to earn his $36 million salary. On this day he would give up nine hits and four runs in a 6-3 loss to the Baltimore Orioles.”

He notes, however, that Cole’s salary was eclipsed by the Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani, who had signed what was then the largest MLB contract: $700 million over 10 years. (Juan Soto of the New York Mets has since signed a deal that gives him $765 million over 15 years.)

Bardenwerper acknowledges that many fans aren’t troubled by athletes making money like this, but says he has come to believe that “the extreme economic inequality personified by Major League Baseball (and all professional sports) was corrosive to a healthy society — and, for me at least, was becoming an almost insurmountable obstacle to my desire to remain a fan.”

The more he gets to know the people of Batavia and the devoted minor-league baseball fans in nearby cities —in Elmira, a man now in his 90s has been sitting in the same seat since 1974 — the more Bardenwerper is troubled by the cost-cutting decisions made by wealthy people who live far away. “Baseball,” he says, “has already begun to resemble yet another extractive industry where dollars are transferred from small towns to big-city owners and investors.”

In some ways, Homeland is a follow-up dirge to a book that Bill Kauffman wrote about Batavia in 2003, Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette: A Mostly Affectionate Account of a Small Town’s Fight to Survive. For a small, unremarkable city, Batavia gets remarked upon a lot. It might yet survive, as might baseball.

The Muckdogs of 2022 can be quite a long season for the casual reader, but Homestand pays off for those who love baseball — and aren’t prone to fidgeting when the game runs long. B+ —Jennifer Graham