The Sweetheart Season: A Novel - Hardcover

Fowler, Karen Joy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805047379 ISBN 13: 9780805047370

Publisher: Henry Holt & Co, 1996

Synopsis

It's 1947 and America has once again made the world safe for democracy. A can-do optimism governs the land - nowhere more so than in America's heartland, the picture-perfect town of Magrit, Minnesota. Headquarters of one of the nation's largest manufacturers of breakfast cereal, Magrit is also home base to the company's mass-circulation magazine, which each week dispenses kitchen wisdom and housewifely advice to millions of women across the country.
It is 1947 and a woman's place is once more in the home. But in rural Magrit, the boys who marched off to war don't seem to want to come back to make a home. For Magrit's young women, the future is decidedly uncertain.
Until the company founder (and town benefactor) decides to form them into a ball team. What could be better for business than a group of lovely young women wearing the company logo and playing the great American pastime? And if, while on the road, the players should happen to meet up with eligible young men, so much the better.
And so the Sweetwheat Sweethearts were born.
This is the story of that team.
But is it?
Told many years after the events by a team member's grown but rebellious daughter, it is a tale of the buoyant forties as reconstructed by a child of the suspicious sixties, a young woman who finds the world of her mother's youth to good to be true: too generous, too innocent, too wedded to happy endings.
Who are we to credit, then, for the odd spins and curious twists that surface in her story - the mother, or her doubting daughter? Little by little as the tale is told, Magrit's slow and steady ways come a cropper. Ghosts are seen. Mistrust is sown. And hearts break.

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Reviews

In the aftermath of WW II, halcyon days have not returned to Magrit, Minn., where the veterans have failed to come home. The men haven't died; they've just moved on to greener pastures, rejecting the local women, who served the war effort in the Scientific Kitchen of Margaret Mill. The mill was founded by patriarchal Henry Collins, the man responsible for Sweetwheats, the world's first puffed and sugar-coated cereal. Henry also invented Maggie Collins, a fictional Betty Crocker-type icon whose popular magazine column gained her the vote as the "most admired woman in America" in 1945. As part of a publicity campaign (and to avoid the formation of a union), Henry creates the Sweetwheats Sweethearts all-girl baseball team, convincing the mill girls that this activity will help them find husbands. The now-adult daughter of a Sweetheart recalls the team's history in a wry, witty voice that balances our revisionist present with the romanticized past. Fowler's (Sarah Canary) authentically detailed and clever novel is frequently digressive, but the digressions charm. Deadpan irony ("The Baldishes had been among the first to explore the possibilities of decorating with deer") and quirky characters worthy of Dickens raise the entertainment quotient. With fictional Magrit, Fowler depicts our nation's past as more surreal than real, while at the same time slamming her novel out of the ballpark. Major ad/promo; author tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A sluggish though skillful second novel from the author of Sarah Canary (1991). The time is 1947. The place is an all-American town called Magrit, in northern Minnesota, whose sole source of employment is a breakfast-cereal factory called Margaret Mill. The main characters are nine pretty millhands who test recipes by day in the company's Scientific Kitchen and, on weekends, play pick-up baseball on an all-female travelling team called the Sweethearts- -assembled by the mill's much-loved and feared founder, Henry Collins, in order to (a) promote the mill's most popular product, the breakfast cereal Sweethearts; (b) help the girls meet marriageable young men in distant towns, because Magrit's own men seem reluctant to come home after the war; and (c) lure back Henry's grandson Walter, a young vet who loves the game. The plot: Just as the team picks up a talented pitcher and gets on a winning streak, a handsome stranger named Thomas Holcrow appears in town. The girls' happy teamwork begins to give way to fractious competition, and all sorts of strange things happen: Recipes stop working, the household-tips column Henry and the girls ghostwrite for an East Coast magazine under the name of the mill's invented guiding spirit, Maggie Collins, begins to appear in print dotted with untraceable revolutionary slogans; sightings of the traditional town ghost, thought by some to be Maggie Collins herself, speed up; and Henry starts aging fast. In the book's final third, the plot thickens as love interests among the girls proliferate and the nefarious Holcrow is revealed to be an FBI agent, infiltrating the town to root out hidden Communists--and, in retrospect, pronouncing the end of American innocence. Narrated by a grown daughter of one of the nine ballplaying millhands (the one who ends up marrying coach-turned-hero Walter), this is a mixed bag: alternately a romp and a slog. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From the author of Sarah Canary (LJ 5/1/92): a town fields a girls' ball team.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Henry Holt & Co
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0805047379
• ISBN 13: 9780805047370
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352