Home Field

by Hannah Gersen

The heart of Friday Night Lights meets the emotional resonance and nostalgia of My So-Called Life in this moving debut novel about tradition, family, love, and football.

As the high school football coach in his small, rural Maryland town, Dean is a hero who reorganized the athletic program and brought the state championship to the community. When he married Nicole, the beloved town sweetheart, he seemed to have it all—until his troubled wife committed suicide. Now, everything Dean thought he knew is thrown off kilter as Nicole’s death forces him to re-evaluate all of his relationships, including those with his team and his three children.

Dean’s eleven-year old son, Robbie, is withdrawing at home and running away from school. Bry, who is only eight, is struggling to understand his mother’s untimely death and his place in the family. Eighteen-year-old Stephanie, a freshman at Swarthmore, is torn between her new identity as a rebellious and sophisticated college student, her responsibility towards her brothers, and reeling from missing her mother. As Dean struggles to continue to lead his team to victory in light of his overwhelming personal loss, he must fix his fractured family—and himself. When a new family emergency arises, Dean discovers that he’ll never view the world in the same way again.

Transporting readers to the heart of small town America, Home Field is an unforgettable, poignant story about the pull of the past and the power of forgiveness.

Genres: Fiction, Sports, Family, Contemporary, Literary Fiction, Adult Fiction, Drama

421 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 26, 2016

Reviews

[Perri · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can sure see the stated resemblance especially to Friday Night Lights -an understated but powerful rendition of a family torn apart by tragedy. It made me reflect on mental illness, specifically depression and suicide, and how it impacts loved ones and causes unintended reverberations.

[Fatima · Rating 5 out of 5]

I received this book in a goodreads giveaway and I'm so glad i did because it's a beautifully written novel about family drama; a father, his teenage daughter, his two young sons, and the small town they live in. For anyone who grew up in the 90's or raised children during the 90's this book will remind you of home. I loved the characters and got attached to them instantly. The plot is both heartbreaking and heartwarming (I'll admit I cried more than once). Overall, I loved this book and highly recommend it! A must read!

[Lesley · Rating 1 out of 5]

I sadly say this took me forever to read, I would try a few chapters, put it down go back read some more but just never enjoyed it. Yes nostalgic of the 1990's and how a family deals with loss from a suicide, but I HATE sports so I wasn't that interested in this coach's life. Just wasn't for me, I am sure many others will enjoy it.

[Chaitra · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wasn't completely sold on Home Field, but it wasn't completely awful either. Dean's a football coach, and I think that's part of it - I myself was never sporty, and try as I might I could not see things from his perspective, that sport is the be all and end all, it cures everything. I also thought Dean lacked empathy, and therefore I didn't feel I owed it to him to be sympathetic to his problems.

Dean is this typical jock, he's uncomfortable with anything or anyone who's different from him - his wife's mental issues are because she lacks focus and ambition, he's unhappy that his older son prefers dancing and plays to sport, he hates that his daughter's best friend is gay. He thinks the purest sense of achievement can be found by something physical as opposed to academics and learning. I know there are people like that, but, it was disappointing that that was all there was to a football coach. And this persists - he keeps these attitudes through most of the book, and even at the end, I felt they weren't all gone. His older son was the one to find his wife hanging in the barn, and there wasn't mention of therapy, even when it becomes obvious that Robbie has issues. I mean, again, I understand that these people exist in real life, but I wouldn't be very sympathetic towards them. I actually liked the lady portrayed as the Jesus freak more - the aunt Joelle, because she at least showed she cared. I didn't get that from Dean.

For all that, the kids were alright, Dean's kids and the girls he ended up coaching. I wanted to read about them. It's just a pity that Dean had such a lion's share of the book.

[Diane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hannah Gersen's debut novel Home Field is billed as a combination of Friday Night Lights and My So-Called Life. That's quite a high bar to set, and Gersen clears it with room to spare.

Dean is a successful high school football coach in a small Maryland town. He runs a terrific program, and is known and respected throughout the town. Years ago he married a young widow, Nicole, whose husband was a high school football hero. Nicole and her husband were high school sweethearts and had a young daughter, Stephanie, when he was diagnosed and died.

Nicole suffers from depression, perhaps she never got over the loss of the love of her life. Dean was smitten with her and young Stephanie, and they married and had two boys of their own, Robbie and Bryan.

As the story opens, Nicole commits suicide and is found by her eleven-year-old son Robbie. Stephanie is set to go away to college, and struggles with leaving her brothers and father to go so far from home. Robbie begins cutting class and acting out, and finally finds salvation by participating in the high school play.

Bryan has spending more time with Nicole's sister and her family, devoutly religious people. Bryan finds solace in religion, much to Dean's concern. He feels that his sister-in-law is unduly influencing his young son.

Coaching a successful high school football program is a time-consuming profession, and Dean comes to the conclusion that he needs to step down for the sake of his children. He also becomes involved with Robbie's school counselor, a woman he knew when she was a substitute teacher at his school.

Stephanie is trying to find her way in the world, and Gersen really nails the feelings of a young woman adrift. She is grieving the loss of a mother she loved, feeling angry that her mother abandoned them all, and sad that her mother was suffering so. She also feels guilty that she has left her brothers behind.

Reading this part of the story took me back to my own time going away to college, so vivid is the connection between Stephanie's experiences and most young women. Bravo to Ms. Gersen.

Just when Dean thinks he is losing it all, an opportunity to temporarily coach the girls cross country track team falls in his lap. He misses football, and he forms a connection with the girls that gives him a sense of control and accomplishment he is lacking in his personal life.

Gersen does a wonderful job with the setting and characters of her story. She has the small town atmosphere just right, and we care deeply about these people, even as we see them making mistakes. Dean in particular needs to learn the importance of verbal communication with his children. They need to talk about what happened to them, and he, like many men, has trouble with that.

Home Field is an emotional, moving book that touched my heart. Gersen's ability to write so beautifully and realistically in the voices of Dean, Stephanie and Robbie is quite an accomplishment. I recommend Home Field to anyone who loves a good family story.

[Megan Coppadge · Rating 3 out of 5]

I received this book via a Goodreads giveaway courtesy of William Morrow.

This is the beginning of the blurb for this book. "The heart of Friday Night Lights meets the emotional resonance and nostalgia of My So-Called Life in this moving debut novel about tradition, family, love, and football."

Now this is totally misleading. Football plays a role in this novel but not a super big one. Maybe about 25%, maybe. Also I don't know where tradition plays a role in this novel as well.

I wasn't super impressed with this book but I liked it well enough to get through it. There were parts that I enjoyed but overall I was kind of disappointed after reading the description and then reading the book. Dean drove me nuts. Without dropping any spoilers... yes he's gone through a huge tragedy but the way he does some things after the death of his wife was just not right. He makes a change with his coaching life that I really liked and was very happy about that. However the way he handled certain things made me want to slap the guy and tell him to wake up. I really enjoyed reading his daughter Stephanie's parts. Her POV is part of the reason I kept going. She was real, honest and relatable and so were her younger brothers.

[Cory Beach · Rating 3 out of 5]

I got this book as a gift from my mom, so felt some compelling force to finish it. It had a good plot but was slow. I didn’t feel like it wrapped up well, lots of loose ends. Nice casual read, though.

[Raymond Rusinak · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite an enjoyable and interesting story. Doesn’t quite live up to the hype of Friday Night Lights meets My So Called Life but none the less, still a good read

[Barbara Moher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Liked it, did not love it

[Kristin Shaak · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think I hated this book. The first chapter is set six months prior to the rest of the book. The mother of the characters kills herself and the rest of the book is the aftermath. Okay I'm going to be honest. I hated the father - HATED HIM. The dude is an asshole. I'm pretty sure he only married Nicole because of her looks and then couldn't handle her mental health issues that she had told him about up front. He even says that she told him she tried to kill herself three times before they met! He is a high school football coach and has three kids who just lost their mom - does he try to understand his kids and help them grieve? No. He's too busy moaning and groaning about his life. He fucking cheated on his heavily depressed wife and then had a on-and-off thing with the woman throughout the following months after her death. He says he can't understand his daughter but doesn't even talk to her. She drives herself to move into her college dorm. One of his sons is spiraling and keeps acting out in school. You find out he was the one who found his mom but does the dad ever sit down and talk to him about it? No. He "doesn't understand" his kids. Honestly fuck this guy. He moved to a small town so he could be head coach at 25 and then bitches non-stop about the small town. He complains that his wife has never left and thinks he's so much more worldly than she is. He complains that he can't live up to her first husband in their minds because they were high school sweethearts and he died so tragically.

I really liked the daughter, Stephanie. Her chapters were sad and she really wasn't coping well but had no idea. Her insights about her mom broke my heart and god the guilt she had about her mom's mental illness. There is a scene where she's on a bad trip at a college party that made my chest ache. All the things she had bottled up all came to the surface at once. One of the brothers, Robbie, had a chapter from his point of view and it was so good and so heartrending.

I only picked up this book because it was blurbed as "Friday Night Lights meets My So-Called Life." I think it could have been a great book if the father's chapters were eliminated completely. If the whole book was from Robbie and Stephanie's POV, I'm sure I would have enjoyed it more. I really wish the author had allowed Nicole to speak - we never really get the whole story there and I wish we would've. The end is a fucking cop-out.

[Meg - A Bookish Affair · Rating 4 out of 5]

I grew up in the county over from where "Home Field" takes place and I started high school in 1999 so I was excited to get a look at a world I knew through this book. Aside from the familiar setting, this book has a really good family drama at its center. Dean is his small town's football coach. His wife was the beauty queen. They have two kids that seem like they're on their way to success. It was an all-American story until Dean's life and the life of his kids is shattered when his wife commits suicide. Each person will have to find their own way to pick up the pieces.

The story mostly focuses on Dean and his daughter, Stephanie, who is desperate to get away from her small town for Swarthmore. I loved the way the author divided the book between these two. Dean is trying so hard not to show what a hard time he is having with his wife's death. I really liked how the author was able to get inside his head and show a really fascinating character that has more going on inside than he would ever admit. I also really liked Stephanie's character in the book. She is on the cusp of being an adult but has so much turmoil rolling through her due to her mother's death.

This is a family that I will be thinking about for a long time. I really felt close to them throughout the book. The author really captures realistic emotions throughout the book so that the characters felt like real people to me!

[Steve Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

i love so much about this novel: its sensitive, well-observed depiction of depression and grief; its careful but also incredibly natural structure and plotting; its serious treatment of small towns and small town life; the choice to alternate between the perspectives of high school football coach dean and his daughter, swarthmore freshman stephanie, and its ability to handle the two equally well; gersen's prose, which is always a pleasure to read but never tries too hard to dazzle you.

the novel begins with nicole, long-depressed wife to dean and mother to stephanie, committing suicide. we spend the rest of the novel watching dean and stephanie grieve and try to rebuild their lives. dean struggles to handle the demands of his job; he tries to repair his relationships with his increasingly aloof daughter and sons; he searches for companionship. stephanie, meanwhile, adjusts to college life; she wonders who her friends are, and struggles to balance school with family obligations. this is a novel about ordinary people trying to rebuild their ordinary lives after an extraordinary tragedy.

i interviewed hannah for the lit pub! we talked about this book, among other things.

http://thelitpub.com/lives-in-the-wak...

[Cindy · Rating 3 out of 5]

As one reviewer said, this is a cozy read. Almost too comfortable for me. It's the story of a football coach who loses his wife and is left alone with three children to raise. Dean is struggling to care for his children and understand and deal with their grief. He is also trying to overcome his own grief and unfortunately I didn't care for the decisions he made in his own now sad life. I was expecting more drama but somehow the story fell flat. Guess I wanted more football, more sensitivity from the dad, and characters that I really cared about. A very entertaining read but not memorable.

I won this book from LibraryThing.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been having trouble with reading books, lately. I've been enjoying audio books, but focusing on reading has been hard. Home Field was the perfect book to sit down with and read. While not a literary masterpiece, it is a good story with characters I could identify with, and I read it straight through. It's about the family of a woman who commits suicide, leaving her husband, daughter, and two young sons to deal with the aftermath. The husband is the main character who has to give up his position as the football coach of a champion team so he can take care of his family, but he's really not equipped to do that. He's not even equipped to take care of himself.

[Stan Blackburn · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars. This story and characters kept me wanting to read, which is a good sign. The characters, however, often became irritating and unpredictable. The older daughter was the most believable, however. Robbie and Dean were at best mildly irritating, at worst unbelievable. The author can craft sentences well but the plot is missing the "it" factor of a solid story. And then there are characters that are left unresolved, like Laura. It was okay.

[Shannon · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really looked forward to reading this book, but I have to say I was greatly disappointed in it. This story could of been so much better, but it rambled around too much. And to introduce another "drama" within the last 80 pages, and not to resolve iit completely? This book left me with too many questions unanswered.

[Susan Csoke · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dean, who is married and the father of three children, living in a rural Maryland town seems to have it all. He is the high school football coach and a hero. When Deans wife Nicole commits suicide, his world is turned awry. THANK YOU GOODREADS FIRSTREADS FOR THIS FREE BOOK!!!

[Nerdette Podcast · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is lovely. It's like FNL+MSCL. Bonus points if you know what that means!

[Caryn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Full review on my blog: http://www.thebookwhisperer.org/2016/...

[Layla · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF'd at approx halfway. It gets more than 1 star because I didn't hate it, I was just bored and couldn't connect.

[Lynn Cutting · Rating 2 out of 5]

This took me too long to read and wasn't what I expected. A Long drawn out story with an abrupt ending. I didn't liked this one very much...disappointing

[Lenore Kuipers-Cummins · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an unusual book...written in four separate parts. It is, if you remember the TV show, "Friday Night Lights" a lot like it because it seems as though a lot of it is based on football....everything about football. The main character throughout the whole book is Dean, who was considered a hero in their small, very rural, Maryland town. Why? Because he brought the football state championship home to the community. He married Nicole, who grew up in that community, the towns' sweetheart, and she later committed suicide.

The book deals with how each character deals with grief. Robbie, who is 11 years old, found his mom dangling from a rope at his grandfather's barn, where Dean grew up. He has many problems, including running away from school and home. He withdraws from everyone. Bry, who is 8 years old, just doesn't understand his mother's death at all. Then there is Stephanie, who was Nicole's daughter by her first marriage, and died, so Dean adopted her at the age of 3. She doesn't even remember her "real" dad, who died. Stephanie is 18 and a freshman at Swathmore College. She misses her mother terribly, but in college tries out being rebellious and sophisticated, while still feeling a huge responsibility to her brothers, who rely on her.

The whole family is all tangled up with football, coaching, cross-country, practices, community expectations, and struggling to juggle everything at once, all while trying to understand their own grief and how each one of them cope with it differently.

There is a book guide for book groups, a suggested list of books, with a brief synopsis' of each that are similar to this book; as well as a "Playlist" of songs that are mentioned in the story, and are part of its' plot.

[Marisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is heartbreaking, beautiful, poignant, and more. Not only is the style poetic, it's easy to read without being flowery. All of the characters are interesting and complex with different journeys of growth so that by the end of the book, each of them has grown and changed (except for maybe Bryan, but he's like, eight years old and far more of a lesser supporting character). I found myself relating to Stephanie in so many ways, and it brought back my first year of college, which was only five years ago, so that experience is still fresh in my mind.

I would've loved to learn more about Nicole since she's such a major character, even though we never get to see her except for brief flashbacks through one of the characters' perspectives. She felt more like a ghost than a person who had once been a part of their family, and I get that that was on purpose, but I definitely would have like to know more about her background without it necessarily coming through the perspective of her daughter or her husband. That's just a minor thing for me, and it didn't even take away from the novel as a whole.

I would recommend this book to anyone in a heartbeat.

[Debra Faust-Clancy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I selected this book for my husband to read because I knew it had something to do with sports and that is his favorite subject. I never read the flyleaf for the summary of what a book is about because I find that it gives too much of the book away, and I would rather discover what the book is about as I read it, not learn in advance. This is a debut Work by Hannah Gerson and it is very well done. However, it is an extremely sad and anxiety producing story for the reader. The mother of the children and the wife of the protagonist Dean, commits suicide very early in the book. The rest of the story is about how the kids and the husband learn to deal with the emotions and feelings the wife’s suicide creates in them for a long time into the future. I have always felt that suicide is the coward‘s way out and yes, that is a harsh judgment. But I have never quite forgiven Anthony Bourdain for his suicide since he had a teenage daughter at the time, who would need the caring support of a father. Back to the book. I would not encourage anyone to read this book since it is so inexplicably sad and we have enough sadness in our lives already. Authors: please write uplifting stories!!

[Jim Barber · Rating 3 out of 5]

So. So

Something about the main character just didn’t ring true for me. He was a football coach whose thought process felt off kilter. I would have found him more believable as a female character. And then, too, there was just a sheer lack of grounded values in this book. The children especially seemed as if they were destined to struggle and seek meaning for the rest of their lives, without anything real to sustain them. Still, it was well written and entertaining for the most part. And certainly an emotional roller coaster.

[Kim Volk · Rating 4 out of 5]

I started reading this book yesterday morning and did not stop until I finished. Needless to say I found the story compelling and the book held my interest until the end - even then I wanted at least another chapter or two. Reflecting on it now, I wish there were a couple of conversations that needed to happen (between some of the characters) that the author didn’t write, so you are left wondering and maybe that’s not all bad. Sometimes it’s ok to not have everything wrapped up in a nice neat bow.

[Terri · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a sad but sweet story about a family who is trying to reconnect after the death of the wife and mother. She took her own life and left behind her husband, a teenage daughter and 2 young sons. Everyone is feeling the loss. Some are angry, some are confused and some are very lonely. As each of them tries to find their place without her, they struggle.

Finally, they find a way to come together and can deal with the loss.

[Deanne Smithey · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was about a family trying to find their way after a tragic suicide rocks the family. I liked that the football coach began coaching the girl's cross country team so he would have more time to spend with his family, even though he did not really know anything about the sport. The coach brought the team together and motivated them to do well, but he had more difficulty bringing his family together.

[Patty · Rating 3 out of 5]

Suicide. I think this is one of the most self-centered, narcissistic, choices a person has. The pain it leaves behind to friends, family is horrendous. That being said, I have never, ever been in a place (mentally ill, terminology ill) that would tempt me to take my own life, so I do not want to judge too harshly.

[Cindy Plett · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book came highly recommended from Goodreads but it seemed depressing, so it sat for a long time. But alas, i finally read it. Yes, it starts depressing, but in the end, you really want to know what’s going to happen when the story ends. This is Hannah Gersen’s first novel and it’s pretty good. Suicide and depression is a big topic in this book, just FYI.