The Sweetheart Season

Fowler's delightful second novel is the story of the magical, postwar summer of 1947 when the hometown soldiers never returned to the small town of Magrit and the young women formed a baseball team to find husbands - and prove the efficacy of breakfast cereal. Or is it? The story is narrated by the now-middle-aged daughter of Irini Doyle, the Sweetwheat Sweetheart's home-run hitter and strong right arm. The narrator tells us right off that she prefers drama to fact and that her mother filtered truth through a generous spirit: " 'I'm just fine. You go and have a nice dinner,' were the last words she ever said to me." So it's the daughter's story of her mother's youth, written from the vantage point of experience, disillusion, affection and love. "When my mother told it to me, it was a very short story. I have been forced to compensate not only for her gentle outlook, but also for her spare narration." Magrit is a mill town, dominated since 1898 by Henry Collins, who drowned Upper Magrit (with the connivance of Lower Magrit, forever unforgiven) to build Margaret Mill, home of Sweetwheats breakfast cereal. An earnest, zany Kellogg-type, adhering steadfastly to scientific modernism, but just a beat behind, Henry is devastated when someone invents fishsticks before he thinks of it. "Fish so transformed that even children would eat it." The idea for the baseball team comes after a Collins dinner party when Henry and his artistic, political wife Ada are waiting with Irini (present as server) for her drunken father to pick her up. The baseball idea is a diversion. Ada is diverting Henry from his enthusiasm for obtaining an ape on which to conduct nutrition studies; Henry is diverting Ada from her enthusiasm for unionizing the mill girls; both are diverting Irini from brooding about her father's undependability. Not that Irini's father is mean or pathetic. A lonely widower since Irini's birth, he's the voice of caustic reason (very un-1947ish) and Irini is the apple of his eye. While Irini's father taught her baseball, her spectacular arm was developed in the mill's Scientific Kitchen, kneading bread. Most of the Magrit girls work in the Kitchen where foods are tested to the strict standard of fictional Maggie Collins, the housewife-heroine whose advice goes out to women world-wide in the company magazine "Women At Home." Fowler peppers her narrative with Maggie's tips. "To prevent snow from sticking, cut an onion in half and run it over the windshield of your car." Women write to her poignantly of war losses and family triumphs. Maggie responds with cheer and practical advice for women heading back into kitchens everywhere. But something is happening to Maggie. Sabotage in the form of phallic fruit salads, and rebellious encouragement of women who love women, who gain weight with abandon, who lift their eyes beyond the kitchen. Meanwhile, the Sweethearts are playing baseball, coached by Walter Collins, the patriarch's grandson and Irini's unappr

Karen Joy Fowler doesn't smack the ball out of the park with The Sweetheart Season, but she does hit a triple, which in baseball is even more difficult! Hearkening to previous efforts from W.P. Kinsella or Garrison Keillor, Fowler paints a picture of life in the kitschy kitchens of WWII America while blending in a fair dose of the fairy tale. The descriptions of the changing roles of women, from hausfrau to Rosie the Riveter and back to the kitchens, were dead-on and disturbing. But it was the lyric storytelling, the portrayal of 'Maggie Collins' as the prototypic Betty Crocker that captured the attention and imagination. Read on a variety of levels, either for sheer enjoyment, or a discussion of women's roles, The Sweetheart Season satisfies.

I truly enjoyed this book, and feel that it would have made it as an Oprah book club selection if only there were more suffering in it. It was well written, and the characters were engaging. Take it to the beach!

I enjoyed this book. Karen Joy Fowler has written a novel that marks out a genre all its own, as it is not quite an "historical novel," not quite science fiction, not quite feminist fiction, and not quite fantasy. It succeeds in being imaginative, politically astute, and historically informative, however, as Ms. Fowler uses the events of the story as a vehicle for including endless anecdotes, "fun facts," and asides that reveal her vast and intricate knowledge of U.S. political and social history. There's even a plethora of "homemaker tips" included, for good measure. The plot is not the point here; in this novel, the "journey is the reward," as each and every page includes verbal gems and incisive bits of social commentary and are endlessly engrossing and enlightening.