Balls

If you link your happiness to the whims of a game, the odds of ever feeling truly satisfied are slim to none. In Balls, Nanci Kincaid reveals the misguided hopes and unfulfilled dreams of women trapped in lives that spiral around the coaches and players of Southern college football. She also exposes a darker side of the sport, where sexist attitudes, racism, and ignorance run as strong and deep as a receiver on a post pattern.

Kincaid creates a large cast of interesting women by switching point of view from one chapter to the next. Her exacting dialogue allows half-joking responses, subtle revelations, and layers of unspoken subtext to shape each character. What happens when the smart, beautiful, rich homecoming princess succumbs to the passion of backseat love and marries the poor star quarterback? Pretty much what you'd expect. "Sometimes I tried to believe the ball was love, truth, or beauty so that I could look at the game, and the men playing it, differently, as if it ... would make the life I was living something worth devoting myself to." But Kincaid has devised a trick play, using stereotype as a trap to lure the reader into an intriguing study of the frailties of human behavior, the restraints on women in a male-dominated culture, and the fascinating ways people change over time as age and experience join to forge wisdom. --George Laney