Offsides: A Novel - Hardcover

Madden-Lunsford, Kerry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0688149359 ISBN 13: 9780688149352

Publisher: William Morrow & Co, 1996

Synopsis

Liz Donnegal, the elder daughter of an assistant college football coach, moves to a new town each fall, where she makes new friends, falls in love, and learns some of life's lessons

About this title

About the Author

An award-winning playwright living in Los Angeles, Kerry Madden-Lunsford has lived in eleven states, ten of which are football towns. She received her M.F.A. in Playwriting from the University of Tennessee, and has produced plays in the United States, England and China. Currently, Madden-Lunsford also teaches in East Los Angeles.

From Kirkus Reviews

An amiable first novel that portrays the slow and reluctant coming of age of the tomboy daughter of a college football coach. Elizabeth Donegal carries all of the usual burdens that afflict the young and the insecure, plus one: She knows more about football than most of the boys and all of the girls in her class. That's because Liz's Daddy is an assistant coach and her life revolves around the football season of whatever college town they happen to be living in at the moment. ``Peace was not a high priority in a football family,'' according to Liz, who found out the hard way. Nearly every year, after all, the Donegals moved to a new town in the hope that Daddy could work his way up to Head Coach, and, as a result, a life lived out of suitcases and in motels and boys' dorms has left the Donegal children with only the vaguest conception (and no firsthand experience) of what most of their peers consider normal homes and family life. Religion provides some continuity for Liz (despite her early premonitions that she might be a feminist or lesbian), and she spends more and more of her spare time in Catholic circles. There, she meets her two first loves: Peter, an artistic loner who commits suicide during his freshman year at Notre Dame, and Robert, who can't seem to decide whether or not he wants to enter a seminary. Although the usual adolescent traumas that Liz suffers are far from lighthearted, there is surprisingly little anger in her telling of them, and her story as a whole is refreshingly free of the self- pity that trips up so many young novelists their first time out. The climax of the tale is as understated as its narration, and manages to be both credible and pungent. Pleasant, winning, and unpretentious. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: William Morrow & Co
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0688149359
• ISBN 13: 9780688149352
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336