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The Northern: A Novel
“The Northern is both a tender-hearted, contemplative coming-of-age novel and adventure-filled road trip story that brings a unique time in sports history to life.” — Zoe Whittall, author of The Fake and The Best Kind of People
“W.P. Kinsella has Jacob Mooney has written another classic Canadian novel about baseball.” — Ben Lindbergh, co-host of Effectively Wild and author of The MVP Machine and The Only Rule Is It Has to Work
It is the summer of 1952 and three men — well, one man and two boys — are on a spiritual and commercial mission. Dispatched from Minnesota to Western Ontario, they have been hired by an upstart Mormon baseball card company to find licensees for their products among the young men filing out Korean War–era rosters in the Northern League, at the bottom-most rung of professional baseball. What the Northern has for them, and the secrets and deceptions they have for each other, will drive their two weeks in Canada into ever-growing chaos.
In a vision of early 1950s Ontario that emphasizes accuracy but remains robustly anti-nostalgic and contemporary, the three businessmen have themselves an adventure of personal discovery, interpersonal hardship, and more than a little danger. With a world shaped by the trauma of World War II and the generations of deflated adults and orphaned children left behind by it, the story sets out on a clear-eyed and psychologically precise character study taking on grief, fantasy, adolescence, and family. As the narrator for this story of salesmen and ambitious athletes, 12-year-old Chris is a budding acerbic, able to be carried away by the — often empty — hopes of others and put his feet in the ground to stop them.
A novel concerned with sports, labor, growing up, and God, The Northern is a funny and heartbreaking book about the series of disappointments that characterize the progress of growing up.
“W.P. Kinsella has Jacob Mooney has written another classic Canadian novel about baseball.” — Ben Lindbergh, co-host of Effectively Wild and author of The MVP Machine and The Only Rule Is It Has to Work
It is the summer of 1952 and three men — well, one man and two boys — are on a spiritual and commercial mission. Dispatched from Minnesota to Western Ontario, they have been hired by an upstart Mormon baseball card company to find licensees for their products among the young men filing out Korean War–era rosters in the Northern League, at the bottom-most rung of professional baseball. What the Northern has for them, and the secrets and deceptions they have for each other, will drive their two weeks in Canada into ever-growing chaos.
In a vision of early 1950s Ontario that emphasizes accuracy but remains robustly anti-nostalgic and contemporary, the three businessmen have themselves an adventure of personal discovery, interpersonal hardship, and more than a little danger. With a world shaped by the trauma of World War II and the generations of deflated adults and orphaned children left behind by it, the story sets out on a clear-eyed and psychologically precise character study taking on grief, fantasy, adolescence, and family. As the narrator for this story of salesmen and ambitious athletes, 12-year-old Chris is a budding acerbic, able to be carried away by the — often empty — hopes of others and put his feet in the ground to stop them.
A novel concerned with sports, labor, growing up, and God, The Northern is a funny and heartbreaking book about the series of disappointments that characterize the progress of growing up.
300 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 6, 2025
1 person is currently reading
2534 people want to read
About the author
Jacob McArthur Mooney
8 books7 followersJACOB McARTHUR MOONEY's debut book of poetry was the much acclaimed The New Layman's Almanac. His work has also received the Banff Centre Bliss Carman Poetry Award. A respected poetry commentator and critic, Mooney writes the popular Vox Populism blog, and was a panelist for the National Post's Canada Also Reads competition. A Nova Scotian now living in Toronto, he is a recent graduate of the MFA in Creative Writing programme at the University of Guelph-Humber.His second collection was published in 2011 and is called Folk.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
April 26, 2025
Thanks to NetGalley and ECW Press Audio for the Audio ARC!
I absolutely loved The Norhern. The world of low-level baseball is fascinating, and I loved the idea of a 'minor-league' card company trying to get the scoop on the 'heavy hitters' like Topps and Bowman by scouting The Northern League. Character development was good, and helped bring the story to life.
I absolutely loved The Norhern. The world of low-level baseball is fascinating, and I loved the idea of a 'minor-league' card company trying to get the scoop on the 'heavy hitters' like Topps and Bowman by scouting The Northern League. Character development was good, and helped bring the story to life.
July 6, 2025
I really enjoyed this, particularly when considering it as a novel of memory.
Although Chris is our narrator, we get more than one Chris in the novel. We hear his child's voice as speaker in quotation marks, but his narrative voice refers to each quotation in the past tense. It becomes clear that this is a story being told by an older person, someone trying to reconstruct and understand a strange moment in his life.
Moreover, it's a memory of memories. Chris is remembering how the people around him try to retain, manipulate, or block out their own memories, to relive or to conquer their own pasts. He brings the knee-jerk cynicism of the tween while also lacking the experience to parse all his experiences in the present tense. His voice as future narrator does not try to solve these strange experiences, barely able to understand them but trying to.
Additionally, it's about collective memory. Mid-century baseball tends to get valorized as being at its cultural apex among fans of the sport, but the novel examines just how desperate or harebrained it always was, whether these specific generations are worth nostalgizing. The "good old days" were stressful, cruel, and traumatized too.
There's so many striking scenes and unanswered questions. Something I really appreciate about the novel is that it tries to mimic an important period in a life, one in which many things are learned, but also many issues are left incompletely resolved. Not every evil is punished; not every confusion is clarified. It is incomplete, but so are all our lives. The narrator, and his reader, can gesture at the narrative as significant or impactful without pretending that it was a complete narrative arc, addressing any future concerns. It helps keep the novel from feeling artificial.
Although Chris is our narrator, we get more than one Chris in the novel. We hear his child's voice as speaker in quotation marks, but his narrative voice refers to each quotation in the past tense. It becomes clear that this is a story being told by an older person, someone trying to reconstruct and understand a strange moment in his life.
Moreover, it's a memory of memories. Chris is remembering how the people around him try to retain, manipulate, or block out their own memories, to relive or to conquer their own pasts. He brings the knee-jerk cynicism of the tween while also lacking the experience to parse all his experiences in the present tense. His voice as future narrator does not try to solve these strange experiences, barely able to understand them but trying to.
Additionally, it's about collective memory. Mid-century baseball tends to get valorized as being at its cultural apex among fans of the sport, but the novel examines just how desperate or harebrained it always was, whether these specific generations are worth nostalgizing. The "good old days" were stressful, cruel, and traumatized too.
There's so many striking scenes and unanswered questions. Something I really appreciate about the novel is that it tries to mimic an important period in a life, one in which many things are learned, but also many issues are left incompletely resolved. Not every evil is punished; not every confusion is clarified. It is incomplete, but so are all our lives. The narrator, and his reader, can gesture at the narrative as significant or impactful without pretending that it was a complete narrative arc, addressing any future concerns. It helps keep the novel from feeling artificial.
March 1, 2025
(I got an advance review copy of this excellent book, but I solemnly swear that's not why I found it excellent. In fact, I enjoyed it so much I've pre-ordered a copy of my own.)
"The noon sun had me halfway to sleep when we saw the bridge appear ahead like the hollow husk of a skyscraper."
Our narrator is 12-year-old Chris, traveling from Minnesota to Canada in the early 1950s with his 7-year-old brother and their sometime father figure, sometime baseball coach, on a sales trip: trying to sell small-time minor-league baseball players on signing contracts with a small-time baseball-card company. Chris crosses that first bridge a couple of sentences later, and spends the rest of the book struggling across others, including the bridge from happy ignorance to uncomfortable understanding that goes by the name of "growing up."
The trip is an odyssey, complete with monsters and shipwrecks and sirens and enchantments, shadows of death and promises of heaven. If "1950s Canadian farm league baseball" and "the economics of trading-card licensing amidst Topps' and Donruss' anticompetitive trade practices" doesn't sound like enough of a hook to draw you in, don't worry: Christopher's journey is universal.
Highly recommended for anyone who's ever felt out of place, anyone who's ever botched a sales pitch, and anyone who's considering growing up.
"The noon sun had me halfway to sleep when we saw the bridge appear ahead like the hollow husk of a skyscraper."
Our narrator is 12-year-old Chris, traveling from Minnesota to Canada in the early 1950s with his 7-year-old brother and their sometime father figure, sometime baseball coach, on a sales trip: trying to sell small-time minor-league baseball players on signing contracts with a small-time baseball-card company. Chris crosses that first bridge a couple of sentences later, and spends the rest of the book struggling across others, including the bridge from happy ignorance to uncomfortable understanding that goes by the name of "growing up."
The trip is an odyssey, complete with monsters and shipwrecks and sirens and enchantments, shadows of death and promises of heaven. If "1950s Canadian farm league baseball" and "the economics of trading-card licensing amidst Topps' and Donruss' anticompetitive trade practices" doesn't sound like enough of a hook to draw you in, don't worry: Christopher's journey is universal.
Highly recommended for anyone who's ever felt out of place, anyone who's ever botched a sales pitch, and anyone who's considering growing up.
April 19, 2025
Thank you to Netgalley, the publisher, and the author for providing a free audio arc of this book in exchange for an honest review.
Take this review with a grain of salt as it is not my typical historical fiction read. I listened to this throughout to give it a try, and I honestly should have DNF'd. This is NOT to say that this is a bad story at all, I myself just became very bored. It is very slow-paced and character driven with not much action throughout (I was hoping there'd be more with some of the games involved).
The one thing I did like about this story is that it does bring to light PTSD and depression that many WWII and Korean war veterans suffered (and to include anyone involved in war) and how it affected families. The narrator was good for this kind of story, but sort of contributed to the lull I had listening to it. Give it a try as you may like it, but unfortunately it was a miss for me.
Take this review with a grain of salt as it is not my typical historical fiction read. I listened to this throughout to give it a try, and I honestly should have DNF'd. This is NOT to say that this is a bad story at all, I myself just became very bored. It is very slow-paced and character driven with not much action throughout (I was hoping there'd be more with some of the games involved).
The one thing I did like about this story is that it does bring to light PTSD and depression that many WWII and Korean war veterans suffered (and to include anyone involved in war) and how it affected families. The narrator was good for this kind of story, but sort of contributed to the lull I had listening to it. Give it a try as you may like it, but unfortunately it was a miss for me.
April 14, 2025
Thank you to NetGalley for the audio ARC!!
This is a moving, raw, sometimes funny, sometimes upsetting coming-of-age story. It's the story of three baseball card salesmen, one adult and two kids, who take a roadtrip across Canada from Minnesota in the early 1950s. They have been hired by a Mormon baseball card company out of Utah, and are working to find licenses for their cards-- men who they can put on baseball cards once they hit the big times in the major leagues. There is a lot of collective, unresolved trauma facing the post-WWII, Korean War generation in the story and Mooney does an excellent job of showing this with the background of bottom-of-the-rung Northern League baseball and two solid, good, but impressionable young men. He doesn't falling into 1950s nostalgia, but keeping things feeling realistic and almost contemporary.
I really liked the narrator for this book. His voice fit the story well. This is a slower book, and if you're looking for lots of action it might not be your thing. It's very character-driven, and has a lot of heart.
This is a moving, raw, sometimes funny, sometimes upsetting coming-of-age story. It's the story of three baseball card salesmen, one adult and two kids, who take a roadtrip across Canada from Minnesota in the early 1950s. They have been hired by a Mormon baseball card company out of Utah, and are working to find licenses for their cards-- men who they can put on baseball cards once they hit the big times in the major leagues. There is a lot of collective, unresolved trauma facing the post-WWII, Korean War generation in the story and Mooney does an excellent job of showing this with the background of bottom-of-the-rung Northern League baseball and two solid, good, but impressionable young men. He doesn't falling into 1950s nostalgia, but keeping things feeling realistic and almost contemporary.
I really liked the narrator for this book. His voice fit the story well. This is a slower book, and if you're looking for lots of action it might not be your thing. It's very character-driven, and has a lot of heart.
May 13, 2025
From my review in The Miramichi Reader:
Two brothers, a father figure, a post-war road trip through southern Ontario in a Hudson Hornet and baseball. Combined, these sound like the ingredients to some sweet syrup of sentimentality, shot in VistaVision with a score arranged by Nelson Riddle. What we get with Jacob McArthur Mooney’s The Northern, however, is something much deeper.
Set in 1952, the Trillium-award-nominated poet’s debut novel follows two boys, Chris and Mikey, as they accompany Larry “Coach” Miller on a trip through the cities in the Northern Baseball League. Their mission is simple, sign ballplayers to baseball card contracts on behalf of a Mormon company out of Utah. To compete with the two big baseball card brands of the day, Topps and Bowman, the Four Corners Baseball Card Company scoured the lowest leagues in professional baseball, signing players to a non-exclusive contract and paying five dollars for the rights to their image, should they make it all the way to the majors. It was a longshot, but one that seemed worth taking.
Told from the viewpoint of Chris, the older of the two boys, we follow them on the road from Minnesota with a man who had served with their father in World War Two and was now romantically attached to their mother. Throughout the journey, members of the trio pair up, isolating the third. The bond that seems like a given, that between the brothers, shears under several points of pressure, and the bonds between the boys and Coach are tenuous at best.
The Northern, which in a sense is a bildungsroman, serves also as an examination of contemporary masculinity. In an era where the online “manosphere” played a crucial role in bringing Donald Trump back to the White House while flooding social media with posts about the “male loneliness epidemic,” McArthur Mooney uses the fifties to unravel toxic masculinity. As Chris travels from Windsor to Hamilton, Erie to Buffalo, he observes how men behave, how they interact with each other and with women. We meet Reg Law, an intelligent, charismatic and talented ballplayer, the one member of the Northern League that seems destined for bigger things, to perhaps don the pinstripes of the New York Yankees or the A with the sharp serifs of the Philadelphia Athletics. Yet it is his prowess with women that garners much of the attention of the novel. Law becomes an almost Andrew Tate-esque figure, one who seeks to show off his conquests to other men and boys around him. This comes as Chris is trying to understand his burgeoning sexuality, impulses to look down a waitresses’ dress or make conversation with the daughter of a baseball coach. Without a steady father figure in his own life to teach him how to be a man, it is easy to see how the social capital bought through seducing and exploiting women might teach Chris the wrong lessons. But countervailing influences, most notably that of his mother, with whom he checks in via telephone, help to keep him on the good and decent path.
Although female characters are few and far between in the novel, they make up some of the most memorable characters. As is so often the case in the real world, these women are forced to punch above their weight in the system of male mediocrity that thrives beneath the tent poles of patriarchy. Not only does the voice of Chris and Mikey’s mother hang low over the whole book, but the commissioner of the Northern League, Marthanne Eccles leaves a deep impression on the plot, the characters and the reader.
It’s clear that an incredible amount of research went into the depiction and detail of the setting. McArthur Mooney resurrects a bygone era not only with accuracy, but with a certain magic. His prose are crisp and clean, demonstrating the same clarity and ability to find le mot juste as he has demonstrated in is poetry. His characters arrive fully-formed and come to life with every detail and description.
The Northern captures the beauty of baseball, of summer afternoons, cleats on grass, concessions stands at the ballpark. The Northern is a worthy heir to W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe, managing a nod in the Canadian classic’s direction without being derivative. While Chris rides the team bus with an injured and heavily medicated Reg Law, Law asks “are you the angel of mercy … come to escort me to the next life?” Chris replies “I’m only going as far as Buffalo.” For lovers of baseball fiction, it’s impossible not to hear Shoeless Joe saying “this must be heaven,” and Ray Kinsella answering “no, it’s Iowa.”
Fans of baseball and collectors or former collectors of baseball cards will love this book, which is the perfect read for a ballpark on a summer afternoon. But more than that, it is a coming-of-age story set in the supposedly-idyllic past that manages to be a timely story for the present day. With this grand slam of a novel, Jacob McArthur Mooney, already a renowned poet, establishes himself as a prose MVP.
Two brothers, a father figure, a post-war road trip through southern Ontario in a Hudson Hornet and baseball. Combined, these sound like the ingredients to some sweet syrup of sentimentality, shot in VistaVision with a score arranged by Nelson Riddle. What we get with Jacob McArthur Mooney’s The Northern, however, is something much deeper.
Set in 1952, the Trillium-award-nominated poet’s debut novel follows two boys, Chris and Mikey, as they accompany Larry “Coach” Miller on a trip through the cities in the Northern Baseball League. Their mission is simple, sign ballplayers to baseball card contracts on behalf of a Mormon company out of Utah. To compete with the two big baseball card brands of the day, Topps and Bowman, the Four Corners Baseball Card Company scoured the lowest leagues in professional baseball, signing players to a non-exclusive contract and paying five dollars for the rights to their image, should they make it all the way to the majors. It was a longshot, but one that seemed worth taking.
Told from the viewpoint of Chris, the older of the two boys, we follow them on the road from Minnesota with a man who had served with their father in World War Two and was now romantically attached to their mother. Throughout the journey, members of the trio pair up, isolating the third. The bond that seems like a given, that between the brothers, shears under several points of pressure, and the bonds between the boys and Coach are tenuous at best.
The Northern, which in a sense is a bildungsroman, serves also as an examination of contemporary masculinity. In an era where the online “manosphere” played a crucial role in bringing Donald Trump back to the White House while flooding social media with posts about the “male loneliness epidemic,” McArthur Mooney uses the fifties to unravel toxic masculinity. As Chris travels from Windsor to Hamilton, Erie to Buffalo, he observes how men behave, how they interact with each other and with women. We meet Reg Law, an intelligent, charismatic and talented ballplayer, the one member of the Northern League that seems destined for bigger things, to perhaps don the pinstripes of the New York Yankees or the A with the sharp serifs of the Philadelphia Athletics. Yet it is his prowess with women that garners much of the attention of the novel. Law becomes an almost Andrew Tate-esque figure, one who seeks to show off his conquests to other men and boys around him. This comes as Chris is trying to understand his burgeoning sexuality, impulses to look down a waitresses’ dress or make conversation with the daughter of a baseball coach. Without a steady father figure in his own life to teach him how to be a man, it is easy to see how the social capital bought through seducing and exploiting women might teach Chris the wrong lessons. But countervailing influences, most notably that of his mother, with whom he checks in via telephone, help to keep him on the good and decent path.
Although female characters are few and far between in the novel, they make up some of the most memorable characters. As is so often the case in the real world, these women are forced to punch above their weight in the system of male mediocrity that thrives beneath the tent poles of patriarchy. Not only does the voice of Chris and Mikey’s mother hang low over the whole book, but the commissioner of the Northern League, Marthanne Eccles leaves a deep impression on the plot, the characters and the reader.
It’s clear that an incredible amount of research went into the depiction and detail of the setting. McArthur Mooney resurrects a bygone era not only with accuracy, but with a certain magic. His prose are crisp and clean, demonstrating the same clarity and ability to find le mot juste as he has demonstrated in is poetry. His characters arrive fully-formed and come to life with every detail and description.
The Northern captures the beauty of baseball, of summer afternoons, cleats on grass, concessions stands at the ballpark. The Northern is a worthy heir to W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe, managing a nod in the Canadian classic’s direction without being derivative. While Chris rides the team bus with an injured and heavily medicated Reg Law, Law asks “are you the angel of mercy … come to escort me to the next life?” Chris replies “I’m only going as far as Buffalo.” For lovers of baseball fiction, it’s impossible not to hear Shoeless Joe saying “this must be heaven,” and Ray Kinsella answering “no, it’s Iowa.”
Fans of baseball and collectors or former collectors of baseball cards will love this book, which is the perfect read for a ballpark on a summer afternoon. But more than that, it is a coming-of-age story set in the supposedly-idyllic past that manages to be a timely story for the present day. With this grand slam of a novel, Jacob McArthur Mooney, already a renowned poet, establishes himself as a prose MVP.
May 23, 2025
Thanks to NetGalley and ECW Press Audio for the digital copy of this book; I am leaving this review voluntarily.
The Northern is basically a coming-of-age story about two brothers and the man who takes them on a trip of the Northern League in 1952. The league is the lowest rung of minor league baseball, so traveling in style, they are not. The goal is to sign the players up with a Mormon trading card company (obviously based in Utah.) There’s a lot of secrets that can’t help but be revealed, and that changes lives.
Overall, this is a good book. I think comparing the author to W.P Kinsella, another Canadian author, who famously wrote Shoeless Joe (the basis for the movie Field of Dreams) is a bit generous. This is the sort of book that I’m glad I got to experience it, but I probably won’t remember the salient details in a few months. I did find the exploration of post-WWII and the unresolved PTSD many men had very interesting.
Peter Outerbridge narrated the book and does an okay job; the book is very much character-driven and slower, and he matched the prose. If you’re looking for a fast-paced adventure, this isn’t it. But if you like reading about sports or a good coming-of-age story, you might enjoy The Northern.
The Northern is basically a coming-of-age story about two brothers and the man who takes them on a trip of the Northern League in 1952. The league is the lowest rung of minor league baseball, so traveling in style, they are not. The goal is to sign the players up with a Mormon trading card company (obviously based in Utah.) There’s a lot of secrets that can’t help but be revealed, and that changes lives.
Overall, this is a good book. I think comparing the author to W.P Kinsella, another Canadian author, who famously wrote Shoeless Joe (the basis for the movie Field of Dreams) is a bit generous. This is the sort of book that I’m glad I got to experience it, but I probably won’t remember the salient details in a few months. I did find the exploration of post-WWII and the unresolved PTSD many men had very interesting.
Peter Outerbridge narrated the book and does an okay job; the book is very much character-driven and slower, and he matched the prose. If you’re looking for a fast-paced adventure, this isn’t it. But if you like reading about sports or a good coming-of-age story, you might enjoy The Northern.
June 10, 2025
In the beginning I worried about the story in this book but stuck with it. The first 85% is a great read. Things slow down considerably and get a bit messy in the end. But still the story holds together well and I would give it an overall rating of good vs great. The story itself is intriguing and I loved reading about the ball players. Chris was a bit of a mess, but that’s to be expected at his age. Some actions though seemed overly mature for a 12 year old.
Good read if you enjoy family drama and baseball.
Good read if you enjoy family drama and baseball.
June 30, 2025
Read because of the spot on Effectively Wild.
As I've mentioned before, I am a sucker for stories about low level baseball. The push and pull between chasing a dream and facing the reality of the situation is engrossing, and that's what makes the Coach + Reg Law characters work so well in this environment. Plus, Chris' coming of age and the themes tackled within that are quite strong. Glad to have found!
As I've mentioned before, I am a sucker for stories about low level baseball. The push and pull between chasing a dream and facing the reality of the situation is engrossing, and that's what makes the Coach + Reg Law characters work so well in this environment. Plus, Chris' coming of age and the themes tackled within that are quite strong. Glad to have found!
June 25, 2025
Bought the audiobook cause I love Peter Outerbridge. The story was great. I found myself really invested up until I got closer to the end, where I felt things got a bit... idk soap opera like. The highlight was the depth of the characters and how well they were fleshed out by the author and Outerbridge's narration, which gave each one their own distinct voice.
August 13, 2025
Yes, there's a baseball player on the cover but this is not a story about baseball players. It's about the universe of baseball. It immerses you into the world of road trips, ballparks, male bonding. And of course baseball cards.
An interesting road trip through a past era. Part of the novel is set in my hometown so it resonated.
An interesting road trip through a past era. Part of the novel is set in my hometown so it resonated.
Read
June 12, 2025My conversation with Mooney discussing the book here:
https://umfm.com/programming/broadcas...
https://umfm.com/programming/broadcas...
May 14, 2025
4.5 stars
I really enjoyed this coming of age novel about a middle school boy who accompanies his brother and mother's boyfriend on a trip to Canada to sign local league players to an also-ran baseball card company. If that sounds like an odd setup, it is! The group goes through a range of sad, funny and odd experiences that paint a picture of the local leagues and culture around them at the time and tell a coming of age story for the protagonist and slowly unfold a complex and sad backstory for the mom's boyfriend.
I didn't know what to expect with this book and if you're looking for a really game-focused book, this isn't it, but I recommend it as a piece of writing and story of a time.
Thank you to ECW Press Audio for an advance listening copy for an unbiased review
I really enjoyed this coming of age novel about a middle school boy who accompanies his brother and mother's boyfriend on a trip to Canada to sign local league players to an also-ran baseball card company. If that sounds like an odd setup, it is! The group goes through a range of sad, funny and odd experiences that paint a picture of the local leagues and culture around them at the time and tell a coming of age story for the protagonist and slowly unfold a complex and sad backstory for the mom's boyfriend.
I didn't know what to expect with this book and if you're looking for a really game-focused book, this isn't it, but I recommend it as a piece of writing and story of a time.
Thank you to ECW Press Audio for an advance listening copy for an unbiased review
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews