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When Ellie’s father dies unexpectedly at only 52, she is bereft — and confused. Her father, James, was a minor poet who wrote one poem that was frequently anthologized. She always had assumed “The Catch” referred to her, and the old baseball they would toss around when she was young tied into that. But when his will is read and his meager possessions distributed, Ellie is angry and put off-balance to learn she isn’t being given that old baseball. Instead, it’s been left to a complete stranger.
Ellie ends up searching for this person, driven to understand. The search becomes not just a way for her to start to make sense of her loss, to grieve, but it leads her to learn things about her father she hadn’t known. Some of the truths she unearths are ones that disappoint her but give her a fuller picture of who her father really was. And as she makes this journey, she begins to figure out what she wants from her life, in her work and from the older married lover she has been seeing.
Alison Fairbrother captures very well the many complex feelings that arise at the death of a parent, particularly a father. These resonated with me, having lost my father 12 years ago. The father of this story is larger than life to his daughter but also clearly has made plenty of mistakes. He has married and divorced several times and has children from each marriage. His simple (and quirky, but perhaps a bit questionable) solution to spending time with all of them is just to bring them to his home at the same time in summer and celebrate all the holidays at once: they have Christmas and Thanksgiving in the heat of the summer, Easter and Halloween as well.
I enjoyed this story and appreciated the parts about grief. I didn’t, however, like the affair Ellie, a 24-year-old, has with a 39-year-old man. I had really expected a different resolution with that plot line and was disappointed. It just seemed like it was headed in a direction that would be a good growth trajectory for the heroine, but then it dropped and rolled to a slow stop in the infield.
A good debut with much to offer but maybe not quite what I would have hoped for.
Rated: Moderate, for 5 instances of strong profanity, about 10 uses of moderate profanity, a few uses of mild language, and a dozen instances of the name of Deity in vain. Sexual content includes references to affairs, a main character who is “the other woman” in a longtime affair, and a few sex scenes that are fairly brief and not too detailed. The story includes a mother who has kept herself slim for years by eating very little and body-shames her daughter for not staying as thin as she is.
*I received an ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review.
