Home and Away, by Joanne Meschery

I reviewed this book on LibraryThing in May, 2013, but I failed to post my review on Bookcrossing. (I corrected that omission just now.) It has been released.

This is the story of two players on a high school girls' basketball team, their team and their coach, told through the eyes of one girl's mother. The mother is a very introspective person, and everything she sees, encounters, experiences, and hears reminds her of something else, which she has to carry through in her mind. The associations are not always clear, but even when they are, it makes for a tedious effort to plod through the storyline. It took me a long time to read this book (almost a week), only partly because my husband and I are going through a move.

My Losing Season: A Memoir, by Pat Conroy

Read and reviewed in February 2011. Given to my son.

More interesting than I thought it would be! I am not a sports fan, so the first chapter, which was all about a basketball game between The Citadel and Auburn University, did not interest me. Two things kept me reading: I am an Auburn fan, and I was away from home, and this was all I had with me to read! I'm glad I did. It was more than basketball; it was a memoir of Mr. Conroy's life at The Citadel, a military school in South Carolina, and his relationships with other students, team members, his coach, and his professors, with flashbacks to his early childhood. It was hard reading about the abuse he suffered from his father, and the agonies of Hell Week his freshman year, and I didn't particularly like the "cussing and swearing", but it was an integral part of college life and team sports. There were some positive parts, too.