Waiting for Teddy Williams /

Mixing a little fantasy with a coming-of-age saga and a healthy dose of the New England tall tale, Mosher spins a charming baseball yarn that will give Red Sox fans something to cheer about while they wait for next year. Ethan E. A. Allen is a home-schooled teenage baseball phenom from Kingdom County, Vermont. Raised by his mom, a country-singing hooker, and his grandma, a foulmouthed curmudgeon who has been wheelchair-bound since Bucky Dent's game-winning homer in the 1978 Yankees-Bosox playoff, E. A. is a loner whose best friend is a statue of his namesake, which overlooks Kingdom County's scaled-down version of Fenway Park. Then a stranger named Teddy comes to town, and E. A. has the real-life mentor he needs (and the Red Sox may have a savior). Mosher is a master at combining sweet and sour: his baseball story stirs W. P. Kinsella fantasy with Mark Harris realism, while his view of small-town New England leavens the grit of Annie Proulx or Carolyn Chute with just the right amount of Mosher's own down-to-earth sweetness. Must reading for all the citizens of Red Sox Nation. --Bill Ott Copyright 2004 Booklist

New York baseball fans won't like this book at all. In Mosher's ninth novel (after The True Account), one of the funniest and most heartfelt baseball stories in recent memory, the Boston Red Sox beat the Yankees to win their division, then go on to whip the Mets to win the World Series. Eight-year-old Ethan "E.A." Allen lives in the rural Vermont village of Kingdom Common. Redheaded, fatherless and home-schooled, E.A. longs to do two things in life-play baseball for the Red Sox and find out who his father is. E.A. is raised on a run-down farm by his smart, cheerful mother, Gypsy Lee, who writes wacky country-and-western songs, and his grandmother, a mean old biddy who swears Bucky Dent's home run in 1978 put her in a wheelchair for life. One night a drifter called Teddy with a mysterious connection to the Allen family shows up at the farm, and soon he's giving E.A. tips on batting, fielding and baserunning. Nine years later and after countless adventures, E.A. is a hotshot pitcher. Aided by Teddy and Cajun Stan the Baseball Man, E.A. ends up pitching for the nearly deflated and defunct Red Sox. His big league adventures are a riotous string of baseball antics involving even more screwball characters like the Sox manager, Legendary Spence, whose talking macaw, Curse of the Bambino, sits on his shoulder in the dugout and torments him by saying, "New York Yankees, number one." This is a baseball fantasy, a warm and hilarious tale of dreams come true. Agent, Dan Mandel. (Aug. 18) Forecast: Mosher is a bookseller's dream, embarking on a coast-to-coast tour every year. This year he's bringing a slide show with him, dubbed "Baseball and the Writing Life," and should win over more diehard fans, even far from his New England stomping grounds. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Adult/High School-This well-written tale from an accomplished author contains many of his trademark elements. It is the story of a boy growing up in rural Vermont in a nontraditional family. Ethan Allen, whose greatest desire is to play major-league baseball, is being raised by his mother and grandmother; his father is long-gone. E.A. is something of a child of the town and encounters fascinating and often comic characters throughout his young years. The dividing line between the heroes and the villains is not those with authority and those without, but rather between those who abuse their power and those who do not. With the return of his father, a promising player in his own time, the boy begins to move toward his dream and the day when he plays at Fenway Park. The book is also about the Red Sox and the place that the team has in the hearts and souls of so many New Englanders, something that has appeal not only for fans, but for anyone who has had that sort of attachment to a team.-Ted Westervelt, Library of Congress, Washington, DC (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A baseball story as sweet and heart-gladdening as the juice from a ripe peach, by highly regarded Vermont novelist and memoirist Mosher (The True Account, 2003, etc.). Ethan Allen, the contemporary version, hails from northern Vermont, just like his namesake. His hometown is Kingdom Common, complete with IGA and five-and-dime, hill farmers on the skids and dark hollows, stoop-sitting pensioners, nail-tough retired schoolteachers still happy to dish unsolicited advice, a company of improbable graybeards, and a statue of the late great Revolutionary War colonel who communes with our Ethan, tendering suggestions here, a fresh perspective there. So a bit of magic is afoot, but there's also Ethan's hard-knocks childhood: a mother and grandmother long on their own patented brand of love though short on wherewithal; and the neighbors, who possess even more malice, and of the physical sort, than his grandmother. Ethan's knack with a baseball lifts him above dread and circumstance, though not without encouragement and support from his nearest, including that brought by the return of his understandably absent father, Teddy. Mosher's talent for giving believable breath to unconventional lives (at one point, Ethan's mother does a topless river dance on the despised neighbor's bulldozer) is on full display, with the most outlandish or suspect behavior given a natural rhythm that's easy to accept, where the offensive and the insightful come wrapped in the same parcel. There are words to the wise--in Mosher's hands they feel burnished, not timeworn--about patience, concentration, and smartness. And the statue says: "Mark my words. With talent comes a high price. Self-discipline. Setbacks. Sacrifice. Risk of failing. If you aren't willing to pay that price, you don't have a snowball's chance." The outcome is as ambrosial as the story itself. Now if only we knew what happens with Ethan and Louisianne. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.