Home Field

May 15, 2016
After his wife's suicide, a small-town high school football coach and his family navigate grief and forgiveness in Gersen's emotionally nuanced debut. In his corner of rural Maryland, Dean Renner is a local hero, a big fish in a small pond: he's the high school football coach in a town where high school football makes you an icon. Father of three. Married to Willowboro's hometown sweetheart, the beautiful, tragic Nicole. But when Nicole commits suicide--a shock to pretty much everyone outside of the immediate family (she was, Dean notes, "so easy to project happiness onto")--Dean and his three kids are left to rebuild their lives while making sense of earth-shattering loss. At 8, Bryan, the youngest and the kindest, is becoming increasingly immersed in his Aunt Joelle's fundamentalist church, much to Dean's (mostly) unspoken dismay. Eleven-year-old Robbie, sensitive and sullen, has started sneaking out of school for illicit lunchtime walkabouts. And Stephanie--technically Dean's stepdaughter--is supposed to be immersed in her new life as a freshman at Swarthmore, but her anger and grief keep pulling her back toward home. Meanwhile, Dean, struggling to keep his family functioning and afloat, finds himself face to face with his past and--slowly, painfully, sometimes joyfully--coming to terms with a future that's nothing like the once he'd planned. A book that simmers rather than burns, its quiet power comes from its meticulous attention to the details of grief. That meticulousness sometimes verges on plodding--occasionally, the book does seem to drag--and it's possible to wish the story felt just a touch less familiar. Still, Gersen's characters are so full, so gently flawed, and so deeply human that it's nearly impossible to resist falling into their world, with all its sorrow and all its subtle joy. A moving all-American family saga; fiction's answer to Friday Night Lights.

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June 1, 2016
Acclaimed as a winning high-school football coach, Dean suddenly confronts the ultimate defeat when his wife, Nicole, commits suicide. In this debut novel, Gersen chronicles the transformation of a bereaved husband and his three children, compelled individually and collectively to grapple with the questions Nicole's death raises about their family's pastand future. Readers share Dean's deep anxieties as he seeks the emotional strength to reassure his troubled childrena son finding comfort in furtively trying on his mother's clothing, another son unexpectedly going missing, and a daughter venturing into sex and drugs. In that search, Dean sheds his identity in football and reinvents himself as a girls' cross-country coach, even as he weighs his guilt-laced attraction to Laura, a young woman who had attracted his eye before Nicole's death. Too many tangled threads here for a tidy denouement, but readers will recognize in Dean's final poise something of the wisdom gained through forgiveness. A memorable dive into the turbid depths beneath the deceptive simplicity of sports' Ws and Ls.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

February 1, 2016

After his wife's suicide, a small-town high school football coach has his hands full with confused eight-year-old Bry; 11-year-old Robbie, who's acting out; and Stephanie, trying to be a cool college student while feeling responsible for her family. From a staff writer for the literary blog The Millions; a 75,000-copy first printing.

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