Tartabull's Throw [Mass Market Paperback]

Henry Garfield (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 2003

What do baseball, werewolves, and time travel have in common?

Cyrus Nygerski knows a thing or two about baseball. But what he doesn't know is that asking Cassandra Paine to a historic 1967 Red Sox-White Sox game will be only the first of several spectacular events of his summer. For one thing, Cassandra is a werewolf and for another, Nygerski is destined to collide with her not once, but twice. Each time, Nygerski discovers, Cassandra's running away from a murder.

Cassandra can foresee the future, but she cannot alter the past -- and it is that which freewheels both she and Nygerski into a whirlwind of suspense, baseball, and danger, in an alternate, nonlinear time line that saves Cassandra from her nightmare and hands Nygerski his dream....

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Tartabull's Throw by Henry Garfield continues the story of Cyrus Nygerski, begun in Moondog and Room 13, and combines the Red Sox 1967 race for the pennant, time travel and a crush on a mysterious werewolf named Cassandra. (The author, by the way, is the great-great-grandson of the 20th U.S. president, James A. Garfield.)

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From School Library Journal

Gr 9 Up-This story begins in the late summer of 1967, as Cyrus Nygerski, a .175 hitter, is released from his minor league baseball team in Beloit, WI. However, the novel's focus soon shifts, as Cyrus meets Cassandra, a girl fresh from the Summer of Love in San Francisco, whom he is convinced he has met before, and who may be a werewolf. After this meeting, readers are propelled on a wild ride from Maine to New York to Chicago and California. Along the way, they encounter a time portal that allows for parallel lives lived in alternate time lines, and shifts in narrative voice and point of view, with a few fairly graphic sex scenes and some gruesome encounters with violent humans and werewolves thrown in. It becomes a little confusing until the extremely dense and detailed explanation comes at the end. However, the parallel stories are put together with the intricacy of an elaborate jigsaw puzzle, and the author evokes the feel of the country in the late `60s, the uniting spirit of a tight pennant race, the coast of Maine, and the scruffy life in the lower minor leagues. And fans of the two other books about Cyrus Nygerski (Room 13 [1997; o.p.] and Moondog [1995; o.p., both St. Martin's]) will enjoy this prequel. It's an unusual and challenging mix for fantasy/sci-fi and sports fans.

Todd Morning, Schaumburg Township Public Library, IL

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Simon Pulse (March 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0689856717
• ISBN-13: 978-0689856716
• Product Dimensions: 6.9 x 4.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,200,622 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Conceived on New Year's Eve and named after Hank Williams (his parents unaware that the legendary singer's given name was Hiram), Henry Garfield was born in Philadelphia on September 4, 1957, one month before the launching of Sputnik. He moved with his family to the Maine Coast just in time to get caught up in the 1967 American League pennant race and become a Red Sox fan for life. The author's great-great-grandfather was James A. Garfield, the twentieth U.S. President.

The author followed in the footsteps of the President's four sons by attending St. Paul's School in Concord, NH, from which he graduated in 1976. After undergraduate studies in English, History, and Astronomy at Beloit College in Wisconsin, the University of Maine, and San Diego State University, he took most of two decades to begin a career as a novelist before earning his MFA in creative writing from the University of Southern Maine in 2004, the same year his historical novel The Lost of John Cabot was published by Simon and Schuster.

He is the proud father of two grown children: a daughter, Polaris, and a son, Rigel. The author raised both as a single parent and dedicated his first novel, Moondog (published by St. Martin's Press in 1995) to them. Polaris recently graduated cum laude in English from the University of Maine; Rigel is studying filmmaking at San Diego City College.

Hank spent most of the 1980s and 1990s in Southern California before returning to Maine in 1999. He now lives in Bangor, Maine with his second wife, Elaine Garfield, RN, who works in the surgical department at a local hospital. He teaches writing at the University of Maine and is a contributing editor and feature writer for Bangor Metro Magazine.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Werewolves of Beloit, January 9, 2004

By 

T. Morris "arlingtonian" (Arlington, TX USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Tartabull's Throw (Mass Market Paperback)

Though this story is magical (as any story about a left-handed second baseman must be), it's also realist in ways that baseball novels rarely achieve without getting bogged down in historical minutiae. Garfield's 1967 is 1967, and at the same time it subtly isn't; his fine manipulations of chronology and causality keep the reader off-balance in consistently fascinating ways.

Tartabull's Throw is the best recent baseball novel I've read, for any age group. High-schoolers will love it; but junior-high and younger should stick with Bruce Brooks or John H. Ritter for a while longer. Adult readers will really appreciate this novel; it may get them howling for more.

3.0 out of 5 stars Too many plot elements and mutually exclusive inconsistencies for my tastes, April 18, 2010

By 

Charles Ashbacher (Marion, Iowa United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Tartabull's Throw (Hardcover)

This book suffers from the problem of there being too many twists and paths in the plot. Among many items of lesser significance, there are raging werewolves, professional baseball and a heated pennant race, life in rural Maine, time travel and the strains between people in families. The setting is 1967, a time of tension in the American society and a year when the improbable happened; the Boston Red Sox won the American League pennant. Most of the action is set in Maine, where Red Sox baseball is a religion, especially when they are fighting for the pennant in the last months of the season, as they were in 1967. As a baseball fan, I was confused when the Red Sox were poised to win and then didn't. Other incongruities also appeared until I found myself questioning what I had read earlier.
At the end, there is something of a reconciliation of the inconsistencies, but I found it grossly unfulfilling. With no clear sequential track to the events and some mutually exclusive, I found this book boring. Which is unfortunate because there were distinct glimmerings of a very good story.

5.0 out of 5 stars Tartabull's Throw by Henry Garfield, October 29, 2002

By 

Dot James (Belfast, ME United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Tartabull's Throw (Hardcover)

KUDOS! I'm a fan! That is to say, a fan of the Red Sox for many years, and now, a fan of author, Henry Garfield.
My own dreams with alternatives to my reality have sometimes haunted me beyond sleep. They are my "should have..., would have..., could have..." dreams. Henry Garfield has put that type of dream into the very words of his novel. Fact and fiction are awesomely merged by this author to create a page-turner of good entertainment. By the way, I'm a "teenager" with 40+ years of experience!