Waiting for Teddy Williams

A vivid portrait of a young man's coming of age in an America that is almost gone, Waiting for Teddy Williams has been hailed by Ernest Hebert as "ranking with Huckleberry Finn in heart, spirit, and insight into the American character." The book begins on the eighth birthday of Ethan "E.A." Allen in the remote village of Kingdom Common, Vermont. Noted for its fervent, if unrequited, devotion to the Boston Red Sox, the village sports a replica of Fenway Park's Green Monster on top of the local baseball bat factory. Here, in a region that lags decades behind the rest of New England, E.A. lives with his honky-tonk mother, Gypsy Lee, and the acid-tongued Gran, wheelchair-bound since the Sox's heart-wrenching playoff loss to the Yankees in 1978. Homeschooled, fatherless, and living on the wrong side of the tracks, E.A. is an outcast in his own town. Haunted by a dark mystery in his family's past, he has only one close friend to talk it over with, a statue of his namesake on...