by: Chris Bohjalian
Goodreads synopsis:
1978: It is the first Thursday in August and temperatures are flirting with ninety when Mira Winston, eighteen years old, drives a practice ball from her tee with a wooden club. The golf ball, weighing 1.6 ounces, tears through the net, travels 150 miles per hour for fifteen yards and slams, with sickening force, into the forehead of a high school junior named Kenny Foster, causing a traumatic rupture in the frontal lobe of his brain. Kenny brings his right hand to his forehead, then topples to his side. He is dead before the ambulance even arrives.
In the wake of this terrible accident—and everyone, at first, agrees it was an accident—Mira looks for comfort in all the wrong places: In her lover, Theo Catton, a married man forty years her senior. In her mother, a well-kept woman with secrets of her own. In the dead caddy’s little sisters, girls bewildered by grief. But when Henry Fallows, the golf pro, looks more closely at the torn net, when the detective investigating the case recalls Mira’s history of recklessness, and when Kenny’s father spies Mira with her married lover, the affluent and mannered community turns on this once promising young woman. A gripping story that takes the reader from the sun-soaked greens of a tony Westchester country club to the fluorescent-lit stand of a district courtroom, The Amateur What happens when one small moment—a swing, a ball, a piece of string—changes the course of an entire life?
Helen says: 🤓🤓🤓🤓
This was my favorite book of the month. I couldn’t wait to get back to reading this one! It’s really a crazy and believable story, and was not what I was expecting at all. I wonder how the author came up with this idea?? Chris Bohjalian is probably the most versatile contemporary writer I have encountered. None of his books are even a tad bit similar…I love everything he writes.
Holly says: 🤓🤓🤓🤓
In general, I love Chris Bohjalian. This is not my favorite book of his, but it a page-turner. Bohjalian has an amazing ability to relate a story with either a male or female voice – it is really uncanny. Like most of his books, this story is somewhat disturbing because it is tragic and a little too close to real life. It’s the “this could really happen to me or someone I know, and how awful would that be; how would someone cope?” I will continue to read every book this author writes – if you are a newbie, start with Midwives, The Double Bind, or The Light in the Ruins. but read this newer one too.
