The Legend of Jesse Smoke

July 25, 2016
When the Washington Redskins name Jesse Smoke their starting quarterback, they become the first NFL team to sign a woman. Skip Granger, the team’s longtime assistant coach, narrates this epic tale set in an unspecified future. Granger discovers Jesse on a beach in Belize, throwing a regulation-size football 60 yards across the water with an arm stronger than John Elway or Tom Brady. He recounts how he convinced Jesse to try out for the team despite being under contract with the Washington Divas of the Independent Women’s Football League, and the story takes flight from there. In a likable and occasionally vulnerable voice, Bausch (Far As the Eye Can See) writes as if Granger were adding to the legend of Jesse Smoke, whom he states was already the subject of movies and other books. The author’s vision of the future reveals the present-day ugliness pervading American culture in matters of gender and sexual orientation. Bausch also provides vivid play-by-play game-day descriptions, a narrative tactic that might turn off some readers were the plot not so riveting. Despite an anticlimactic conclusion, the novel is an entertaining sports narrative bolstered by weightier issues for readers to contemplate.

June 15, 2016
This sports-hero entertainment conjures up a woman who can play professional football in a book that isn't overly serious about such social issues.While vacationing on a Belize beach, Washington Redskins offensive coordinator Skip Granger spots Jesse Smoke throwing a football better than most NFL quarterbacks. She's 6 feet 2 inches tall and weighs about 180, with a lithe boyish build and freckles that Skip, the book's semismitten narrator, will mention frequently, along with her blue eyes, curly hair, and sweet smile. Impressed but initially only mulling a practical joke at a Redskins tryout camp, Skip gets serious about signing Jesse as a quarterback after seeing her in a women's pro game. Then Jesse also reveals that she can kick field goals with 100 percent accuracy from 50 yards. As she begins to set the team on course for the Super Bowl, the genre demands major obstacles, which here include: transgender rumors; the reappearance of a bad mom; weird nosebleeds; a missing birth certificate; and legal action by the players' union, hoping to oust the lady and preserve the game's integrity (no laughing, please). Bausch may be best known for the novel that became the movie Bruce Almighty. He's also the twin brother of another fiction writer, Richard Bausch. In his eighth novel, Robert frames the narrative as a book written by Skip years after the events. This allows the coach to expose his weakness for sledgehammer foreshadowing at the end of some chapters, for instance: "And thus began the brief, heartbreaking career that became the legend of Jesse Smoke." Bausch clearly is having fun--awkwardly so at times--with what is largely a teen genre aside from exceptions like Malamud's brilliant The Natural. He even tosses in a Shroud of Turin reference (Jesse = Jesus?). There's more football here than a nonfan might enjoy, but Jesse is impressive, the play-by-play is well-done, and the plot twists are less ham-handed than they seem at first. Those unfamiliar with football will be heartened to learn that the game's moves, strategy, and terminology are explained well enough that they'll be able to appreciate just how thoroughly la femme here kicks male derriere.

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June 1, 2016
A female quarterback in the National Football League? Around this surprising premise, Bausch spins a tale probing the way America's most popular and most violent sport definesbut could dramatically changegender attitudes. Hero of that tale, the astoundingly athletic Jesse Smoke so impresses Washington Redskins assistant coach Skip Granger that he pulls her out of a women's football league as a prospect for the Redskins' roster. Braving derision and worse, Smoke first makes it to the field as a placekicker but then turns a bad snap into a perfect pass to a pass-eligible lineman, so improbably launching herself as a barrier-breaking superstar quarterback, infuriating opposing defenders, their fragile male egos threatened by this maddeningly elusive female interloper. Bausch's social-cause narrative may carry Smoke to final triumph as the MVP of the Super Bowl rather predictably (too predictably to warrant a spoiler alert), but this stereotype-smashing narrative will leave readers wondering, Will this novel survive merely as a feminist fantasy, or will it win recognition as a bold harbinger of real events?(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)