Ruby & Spear
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- 10,99 €
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- 10,99 €
Publisher Description
Fired sports columnist Vic Worsley discovers a renewed vigor for life when he becomes involved in the promising career of Spear, a talented young basketball player, who refuses to trust Vic's encouragement.
Sportswriter Vic Worsley is forty-four, divorced, and burned out. His basketball column for the San Francisco Chronicle is fueled by strong coffee, red wine, and anger, instead of the love he once had for the game. But his life is about to be changed by two women. One is Greta Eagleheart, whom he has known, worked with, and flirted with for three years; the other is a fierce old soul named Ruby Carmichael, who insists that Vic come watch her child play basketball as no one before him ever has. Although Vic resists at first, he finds himself inexorably drawn to the roughest neighborhood in Oakland--to Tillsbury Park, where many of the legendary great men got their start.
Spear Rashan Benedentes is a twenty-seven-year-old giant, a phenomenal athlete who soars effortlessly above the rim and commands the respect and awe of Tillsbury's savviest players. In spite of his protestations and bad back, Vic is thrust onto the court, where the game is as serious as life itself. While Spear teaches him a new understanding of sport, brotherhood, and family, Greta forces him to look deep within himself--for the courage to change and for the strength to play and love with all his heart.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
As in his earlier books, such as Inside Moves and Forgotten Impulses, the protagonist here is a jaded piece of work. A basketball columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, Victor Worsley is disgusted with what he sees happening to his beloved game. After a particularly bellicose column on same, he is let go. On the up side of this middle-age crisis, the newspaper secretary he's loved for years, Greta Eagleheart, makes it clear that the feeling's mutual. And Ruby Carmichael, a witchy woman from Oakland, bullies and cajoles him into coming to see her foster son, Spear Rashan Benedente, the 27-year-old inner-city hoops star who will renew Victor's faith in the game and in human decency. There's no doubt that Walton's a good prose stylist, but as a story, this New Age fairy tale is unlikely to appeal to any but the converted. Everyone here has had some horrid past experience that made them unmitigated saints, usually of the Buddhist or pantheistic varieties. There's a fair amount of spiritual consultation (While throwing her chicken bones, Ruby borrows a piece of pink tourmaline that Greta found at a "moon ceremony on the Lost Coast." It is, says Ruby, "a good rock," with a "strong, clean energy.") The outcome of the story is never in doubt, as the northern Californian spheres all align in total harmony.
