The Spring Habit

by David Hanson

Abner Doubleday invented baseball. Jackie Robinson integrated it. Now Sister Mary Bernadette is out to redefine what it means to throw like a girl. The big league Washington Memorials grudgingly welcome a new prospect to 1994 Spring Training, a nun with a nasty knuckleball. She’s on a mission to make the club and use her contract to save her beleaguered hometown Church. She enters this world of men armed only with a tattered glove and a dream she thought was gone forever. Sister Mary is chaste and virtuous -- a nun, but also an athlete who cannot be contained by her habit. She bonds with another outsider in this all male world, the team's beat reporter, Amy Springer, a temptress laced with vice but with secret dreams of virtue. Both are strangers in a strange world where they are not wanted and not welcomed. Find out what happens when a team of pro baseball's best is forced to locker with a woman, who happens to be a nun. Nuns shouldn't be in locker rooms. Women shouldn't be in men's locker rooms. And young nuns shouldn't be on the rubber for game seven of a World Series. Maybe three wrongs do make a right!

272 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2004

Reviews

[louisa]

Read this unpretentious charmer in a day. Written by a former administrator here at the library, the work appeals to the kid in me who loved Sister Mike on Father Dowling. Gentle read with sports appeal that doesn't hit you over the head with its religion. Like a sports movie, the work is heavy on formula, but Hanson is good at getting out of his own way and letting the story tell itself.