Finnie Walsh
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Steven Galloway's first novel, an incredible coming of age story, now revised and available in trade paperback from Vintage Canada.
Finnie Walsh is a captivating, Irving-esque story of family, friendship, redemption, and legend.
Paul Woodward lives in Portsmouth, a quiet northern mill-town. Born the day Paul Henderson planted the puck between the pipes against the Soviet Union to win the 1972 Super Series, Paul has no choice about playing hockey. His best friend Finnie Walsh is stinking rich. He is also fellow hockey fanatic and the only good kid in a long line of delinquent brothers. Paul's father works the nightshift at the local mill, owned by Finnie's father. One fateful day the boys noisily prepare for their first season of hockey in the Woodward driveway, keeping Paul's father awake when he should be sleeping. This triggers a chain of world-altering events. Galloway proves that childhood innocence, while not exactly bliss, can be amusing and more than mildly instructional. This is the book John Irving would have written if he understood hockey as well as wrestling. Finnie Walsh, like the fabled games before NHL expansion, is a story about greatness and legend. But it's also a heartsong to family, friendship, and atonement.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Two fundamentals must be mastered in any successful sports novel: one is a penetrating knowledge of the sport in question; the other is skillful characterization. Galloway exhibits the former in spades, but the latter is less evident in his promising but uneven first effort. Paul Woodward, son of a mill worker in a small northern Canadian town, grows up playing and practicing his position as defenseman with his best friend and goalie, Finnie Walsh, son of the mill's owner. Their unusual friendship transcends class boundaries and develops through a series of accidents and near-supernatural coincidences that unfold over 14 years. Both eventually make it into the minor leagues, playing on the same team for a while, but when they meet up later on opposing sides of the ice, a foolish but loyal act leaves one of the two permanently sidelined. Some of the supporting characters--including Paul's younger sister, who is always wearing a lifejacket and receives premonitions from her bedside lamp, and a one-armed janitor who keeps losing his prosthesis--are quirkily engaging, but while this bittersweet first novel is workmanlike, it never quite captures the imagination or the heart. Intrusive editorial comments about the state of professional hockey and some rather clumsy attempts at armchair psychoanalysis hobble the narrative, which slips and slides aimlessly in the second half--although in the concluding pages it recovers some of the momentum promised in the opening section.
