I do not watch sports. I do not play sports. At work when my team leader jumps into an in-depth conversation with a customer and rambles off statistics and names and bad passes and failed throws I can only boggle when she is surprised that I do not care. I am not crazy about football, or football movies or football television shows, unless you count Varsity Blues, which I was obsessed with because I was a slobbering fangirl.

Wait. I should be honest. The truth is I am bitter at most sports because they become fandoms where grown men can strip and paint themselves pretty rainbow colors while I’m maligned for writing porn about characters I did not create. This is a personal bias: I am inclined to hate all sports on principle just for being mainstream and acceptable things to froth about. Well, guess what, sports fans, I read real person slash about your famous players! TAKE THAT and chew on it. In your face.

To be fair, this story is not about football even though football is a vehicle for the plot to move on, but I think it is important to a) know a little bit about the game and b) be able to handle long sequences of narration about games, plays, and similar events where Ben talks about it at length. The story opens with Ben discovering he has a terminal disease. Instead of choosing treatment for it after learning about his odds, he decides to live out his last year keeping it a secret from everyone, including his family. It’s a story about secrets and shame and choosing to live instead of hiding. I really loved how Crutcher weaved Ben’s story and secret into the secrets of so many other characters. I especially loved Ben’s relationship with Cody. Oh, this story, it doesn’t pull punches.

I’m going to pull out the feminist bitching card and file a complaint with the “Old Dudes Obsessed With Making Women As Fucked Up As Possible” department. So many of the back stories were tied up with sex or The Crazy and I can’t figure out if it’s just because Crutcher was lacking in the creativity at the time he wrote it or if he was just obsessed with deviant sexual behavior and considers women unimportant to the story except as stones for men to walk all over in order to highlight how awesome they are. Dallas’s back story tugged at me after I finished. It bothered me that her story was defined by her sexuality that her character was defined by her sexuality. The other two female characters were practically nonentities. One got to be totally fucking crazy! Fucked in the head, literally fucked, fucked socially if certain truths were revealed, fucking ignorant and parroting the lies of the father…well, I give a big fat FAIL to this book for portraying no major female characters that were strong and healthy and smart. My rule is: if an author uses rape as a major characterization tool for a female character, I give them the Sexist Stink-Eye for the next ten books I read that they’ve written. CHRIS CRUTCHER: ON NOTICE FOR SEXIST TROPE SHENANIGANS.

I really am intrigued over how much sexuality played a part in some of these stories as character-defining traits. Crutcher built so much of so many of these characters over their sexual pasts. I suppose it’s because sex is EXCITING! and EDGY! or maybe just realistic because if people aren’t having it they’re thinking about having it.

Meanwhile, this book has, hands down, some of the best narrative I’ve come across all year. It was fabulous and funny and poignant. Ben doesn’t aim for his death in a grim way — he does the exact opposite. Even though he’s so small, he joins the football team with his brother, and lives the first half of the last year of his life as a hero of small town football. I found the conversations he had with Hey-Soos fascinating. There’s several ways to look at them, but I read it as if Ben was sorting these things out with his subconscious in the best way he could. Religion outright took him too close to death — so many people go that route, so he parsed it through Hey-Soos, which was safer and an easier way for him to deal. Spirituality is a funny thing; there’s so many ways to turn it. The religion in the book reminds me of four-dimensional cubes and the way they exist; the waves and the ways in which they move—you never see all the sides.

I was all weepy at the end. Damn sad books. ;_;

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