A portrait of teenage baseball phenom Ethan Allen, living in a Red Sox-obsessed Vermont town, coming of age in a slice of America that is almost gone.
Critic Reviews
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Outstanding
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Chicago Sun-Times Ron Franscell
Mosher's blend of quirky characters, contemporary mythology and mischievous prose is utterly original and entertaining.
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Outstanding
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Publishers Weekly
One of the funniest and most heartfelt baseball stories in recent memory.
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Favorable
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Kirkus Reviews
A baseball story as sweet and heart-gladdening as the juice from a ripe peach.
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Favorable
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Booklist Bill Ott
Must reading for all the citizens of Red Sax Nation. [Aug 2004, p.1901]
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Mixed
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Boston Globe Brad Leithauser
Taking the book on its own terms, then, I only wish the comedy were a little sharper...Much of this comes across as that sort of nudging humor, with a laugh track serving as an auditory elbow in the ribs, which one associates with TV sitcoms.
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Mixed
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Los Angeles Times Susan Salter Reynolds
Ethan is a classic, even if the world that Mosher builds around him is littered with vernacular. You almost have to love baseball to enjoy the novel. [15 Aug 2004, p.R11]
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Unfavorable
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Washington Post Matt Schudel
The novel devolves into an unwieldy farrago that resembles a Southern gothic (with a worse climate) awkwardly joined with "Angels in the Outfield" and "Major League." Its story moves swiftly and has a certain sweetness, but the characters and plot are exasperatingly predictable, like a pitcher who telegraphs his curveball.
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Unfavorable
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Entertainment Weekly Daniel Fierman
A swing-and-miss, a mishmash of olde tyme tropes that in its better moments recalls the baseball pulps of the '40s and '50s, and in its worst, a rejected screenplay for ''Field of Dreams.''
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