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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
the village green.
Into the world of the Allen family comes
a drifter named Teddy, who is determined to do one decent
thing in his life by teaching E.A. everything he knows about
baseball. As E.A. grows up and learns the secrets of the
game, we get to know Kingdom Common and its flinty, colorful
people. We also meet the incomparable manager of the Red
Sox, the Legendary Spence, "the winningest big-league
manager never to win a World Series," and his macaw,
Curse of the Bambino. When the Sox’s new owner vows
to move the team to Hollywood if they lose the Series again,
Spence, his pitching corps decimated by injuries, has to
take a chance on a young nobody from Vermont.
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