Cannacorn

by Con Chapman

The Worcester Quahogs are a mediocre minor league baseball team owned by Bud Templeton and mismanaged by his son, Trey, who is installed as Executive Vice President to give the feckless young man a purpose in life. To his father's surprise, Trey takes to the job with relish and uses the experience as fodder for a book about Our National Pastime that he hopes will win him literary fame. He is distracted from this dream, and the charms of his fiancée, by one Nae Ann Embree, a cheerleader hired by his father in violation of the game's traditions. Nae Ann becomes the focus of a love quadrangle Trey; Chip Hilton, a white first base prospect whom she lives with; and Delfayo Newbill, a black slugger sent down from the parent club due to his hair-trigger temper. The romantic catch-and-release combines two of America's most beloved native baseball and screwball comedy. Con Chapman is a Boston-area writer and playwright. He is the author of The Year of the How the Yankees Won (and the Red Sox Lost) the Greatest Pennant Race Ever, a history of the 1978 Red Sox-Yankees season. His plays The Little Theatre and The Undertakers Club, for middle and high school audiences, are published by Eldridge Publishing and Brooklyn Publishers, respectively. His trilogy of plays about hockey-Please, Pope; Number One Hockey Mom; and What Mickey Belle Isle Told You-is published by JAC Publishing, as is A Guy Walks Into a Bar, a trilogy of plays about The Writer and the Talker, Let Me Buy You a Drink, and The Night of the Grasshopper. His humor has appeared in magazines including The Atlantic Monthly and The Boston Globe Magazine, and he is a frequent contributor to the Boston Herald. His humor appears on-line at News Groper, Amazon Shorts, and Flak Magazine.

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Tracy Fabre · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nothing goes unskewered in this novel. The rich, the poor, the educated, the uneducated, the monied and unmonied, city folk and country folk, cheerleaders, Canadians, bling, journalism, publishing, ethnic groups, Worcester and even clam-shaped team mascots and "blind" umpires -- everything takes a well-aimed hit in Cannacorn. I believe Con Chapman could satirize a flake of snow and manage to get a laugh out of it.

Baseball holds them all together, one way or another, and Con's love for that shines through as well. His characters, all flawed, are all colorful, and the dialogue is natural and amusing. There's a few twists along the way and one near the end which took me quite by surprise... and I'll never again see an accent mark on a name without thinking of this novel -- with a smile.