No Excuses

by Stephen Harris

In this Young Adult novel, 16-year-old Skeets Stearns is a farm boy from Vermont's rural Northeast Kingdom who finds refuge in the rugged mountain behind his family farm. Roaming the mountain has made him strong, like the legendary catamount wild cat. But his physical strength has yet to give him the courage to date pretty, popular Becky Winslow, star of the high school girls' track team.
Before enlisting as a pilot in the Navy, New York City-raised Bill MacColl had been a contender to make the US Olympic Team as a decathlete. But that dream ended when his plane was shot down in combat in the Vietnam jungle. Trying to put his life back together, MacColl moves in with the Stearns family in Vermont, counting on the fresh air of the farm and the mountains to heal him.
An unexpected friendship blooms when MacColl trains Skeets to compete in the Eastern States High School Track and Field Championship. Will Skeets win the championship, and the heart of Becky Winslow? Will Bill learn to accept his disability? No Excuses is the story of transformation, triumph, and resilience as two opposites struggle together to better their lives.

142 pages, Hardcover

Published August 2, 2022

Reviews

[Amanda Sanders · Rating 2 out of 5]

The author”s writing style is very old-fashioned. This would be cute if the setting matched it. The location of rural Vermont matched the old-fashioned style but the time was vague. All he mentioned was pre cell phone. I found that annoying and had to take characters’ ages and subtract years. I think it was set in the 80s but if I had to guess from writing style I would have said 50s. In the story, Skeets runs through the woods around his farm and does a lot of farm work but doesn’t think he would be good enough for any sports. A Vietnam vet moves in with his family. The vet was a former track star. He convinces Skeets to go out for track and run a decathlon. The descriptions of the meets are well done but most of the story line is slow and annoyingly vague. When MacColl, the vet, tells Skeets why NY is called the big apple, he doesn’t give an accurate answer and just says because it’s big. A simple internet search can answer that. The author mentions peoples’ race way more often than he needs to.