Balls

September 1, 1998
Kincaid (Pretending the Bed Is a Raft, LJ 9/1/97) scores another touchdown with this funny, entertaining novel about college football coaches and the women who love them. Set in Alabama, a fanatical football state where the late legendary Paul "Bear" Bryant is still worshipped, the plot focuses on the marriage of Dixie Carraway, an ex-homecoming queen, to Mac Gibbs, a former college quarterback. Narrated alternately by Dixie; her mother, Rose; Dixie's best friend, Frances Delmar; and a range of other vividly drawn female characters, the novel traces Dixie's transformation from young, adoring wife of a high-school football coach into a mature, independent woman disillusioned by the "win-at-any-cost" attitude of big-time college sports. Twice married to coaches, Kincaid knows her Southern football culture thoroughly. ("Alabama likes old coaches better than young ones. If a coach has at least one brother sent to prison, that really helps.") Despite some fumbles (a few minor narrators could have been cut), the novel's warm humor and eccentric characters, so reminiscent of Lee Smith, kicks this into the winning end zone.--Wilda Williams, "Library Journal

July 1, 1998
"Balls" might be read for the wrong reasons, or at least not the best reasons, but that's okay. It's a novel by the wife of two big-time college football coaches (currently of the University of Arizona's Dick Tomey), and it's about being the wife of a big-time college football coach. As such, it promises an insider's view of the unrelenting pressure to win, the compromises that pressure begets, and the personal costs that are paid by the players, their coaches, and the families of both. And it surely does deliver on that score. But that's old hat, and it comes nowhere close to suggesting why the novel is so engrossing. Kincaid's story is told through the voices of a wealth of characters--the coach's wife, his mother, his wife's mother, his daughter, the wives of his assistants, and the mothers of his players--and they are all dead-on authentic. They are also all women. The great irony is that while the novel centers, or seems to center, on the most macho of sports, it is all about the inner lives of women. In that respect, far more than in its insights about sport and society, it is unfailingly perceptive and deeply moving. Football fans might be deceived, but they won't be cheated. This is a terrific book. ((Reviewed July 1998))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1998, American Library Association.)