First Love, Second Draft

With only about two months to go until the official OPENING DAY for Major League Baseball…this book is a great “season” appetizer, especially for reader-baseball fans… 

A wholesome, sweet love story about how a couple, divorced for five years, gets a second chance to fall in love all over again.

 

Becca Kinzer treats readers to a wholesome, sweet romance that brings together a couple divorced for five years in First Love, Second Draft.

 

Forty-two-year-old Gracie Parker of Alda, Illinois is a blocked romance writer. She’s also hobbling around, sidelined from a freak accident that injured her hip. She struggles to pay her medical bills and those of her ailing father. With Gracie in need of cash flow, her nephew slyly rents a refurbished cabin on her property to her ex-husband, Noah Parker, a 40-year-old, sidelined Major League pitcher for the Seattle Mariners plagued with issues of his own—including still carrying a romantic torch for Gracie.

 

Noah returns to town, offering to help Gracie convalesce in the hope he might also convince her to help him write his sports memoir. In reuniting, the couple begins to learn things they never knew about each other while also coming to terms with what drove them apart—Gracie was focused on a having a baby she couldn’t have and thus became resentful of Noah whose passions were with baseball. When Noah is asked to pitch for the World Series, the strides to rebuild the couple’s relationship are suddenly challenged and emotional wounds from the past once again resurface. 

 

With great tenderness, Kinzer (Dear Henry, Love Edith; Love in Tandem) delivers enough literary curve balls and changeups to keep readers fully invested in a hopeful story aimed on the prospect of new beginnings in life and in love.

 

First Love, Second Draft by Becca Kinzer

Tyndale Fiction, $17.99 paperback, 9781496489029, 320 pages

Publication Date: April 15, 2024

To order this book on Bookshop.org, link HERE

 

Learn more about author Becca Kinzer HERE

 

Steal Away Home

A revelatory, spiritual novel about a young man whose big-league baseball dreams upend his life in extraordinary ways.

Owen Cross, from a small town in Shenandoah, Va., thought playing baseball was all he ever wanted. His passion was instilled by his father, Paul, whose big league aspirations were cut short by an injury. Paul--a high school janitor--encouraged Owen to master all aspects of the game. But when Owen crossed paths and fell in love with Michaela "Micky" Dullahan, a rebellious local girl "considered plain white trash," his life was upended. Micky's family was poor and struggling, her father a notorious alcoholic. Owen and Micky forged a bond they kept secret, lest they face familial and public disapproval. And the limits of their relationship became even more dramatically tested as Owen readied to leave for college on a baseball scholarship.

At the age of 29--in the 1990s, the heyday of Cal Ripkin and Derek Jeter--Owen is finally called up from the minor leagues to serve as a fill-in catcher for the Baltimore Orioles, playing against the New York Yankees in the Bronx. Over the course of that one special Major League baseball game, star-struck Owen closely re-examines his life and the emotionally charged circumstances that led to the pinnacle of his long-held dream.

Coffey (Some Small Magic) beautifully renders a thought-provoking story about the stony path toward spiritual enlightenment. As Owen experiences all nine innings of the big game, the idea of time and how it can lend perspective rises to the fore of this powerful, inspirational story centered on the bittersweet nature of grace and redemption.

Steal Away Home by Billy Coffey

Thomas Nelson, $15.99 Paperback,  9780718084448, 400  pages

Publication Date: January 2, 2018

To order this book on INDIEBOUND, link HERE

NOTE: This review is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (January 19, 2018), link HERE