A spirited debut of a rising basketball star wrestling with his town’s outsized expectations and his family’s complicated legacy Everyone seems to know Jimmy “Kamikaze” Kirkus, the half-white, half-Asian basketball sensation from small town Oregon. College coaches flood his mailbox with recruiting letters, Sports Illustrated has already profiled him, and everyone in town hangs on his every shot. But nobody can possibly fathom the weight of all this upon Jimmy’s shoulders, or the looming legacy that casts a wide shadow. Todd “Freight Train” Kirkus seemed destined for the NBA until he impregnates Genny Mori, the tough yet fragile daughter of the only Japanese family in town. Dreams of stardom and riches are traded in for a hasty marriage and parenthood until tragedy slams the Kirkus family. Jimmy and his wisecracking little brother Dex are born into a broken family, one haunted by wasted talent, alcoholism, and death. Like Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding and Friday Night Lights (the book and cult television show), Timothy Lane’s debut novel uses sports as a lens to understand family, community, catastrophe, passion, and hope. Populated with complex characters, Rules for Becoming a Legend is deftly written by an author who understands basketball as well as he understands the human condition.
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“Bryan Langlitz’s narration relies
on emotion, which is so appropriate for Timothy Lane’s compelling drama about a
troubled kid who is trying to find his way on and off the court in the Northwest.
Langlitz sets the tone in the opening scene, then spends the rest of the book
shaping the plot with a determined, animated narration. The story evokes
alternating empathy and laughter as the nonlinear plot bounces to points before
and after the incident described in the opening scene. Langlitz’s energetic
narration helps listeners keep it all straight. He shines more with tone than
with voices—a nutty grandfather is done well—in a story that is equal parts
coming-of-age, family dysfunction, and sports.”
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AudioFile