| In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle |  | Author: Madeleine Blais
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Pr
Category: Book
List Price: $21.00
Buy Used: $0.01
You Save: $20.99 (100%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  50 reviews
Sales Rank: 1001026
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1st
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 263
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.5 x 1.3
ISBN: 0871135728
Dewey Decimal Number: 796.3236209744
EAN: 9780871135728
ASIN: 0871135728
Publication Date: January 1995
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com Review
They were a talented team with a near-perfect record but a reputation for choking in the crunch of the state playoffs. Finally, after five straight years of disappointments, the Amherst Lady Hurricanes found they just might have what it took to go all the way. This is a fierce, funny, and intimate look into their minds and hearts during one very special season. A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction.
Product Description
A look at the trials and triumphs of high-school girls' basketball chronicles one season of the Lady Hurricanes of Amherst, Massachusetts, as they learn loyalty and self-confidence on their way to a championship game. 35,000 first printing. Tour.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 45 more reviews...
 Not much basketball in this book. August 5, 2008
This book is filled with the most mundane details about each girl on the team, the town and people of Amherst and surrounding towns, local history, Emily Dickinson, the evolution of women's sports, etc., but it provides very little text about basketball itself. It devotes only a few pages in the whole book to describing anything that actually occurred during a basketball game. I read it with my 13 year old daughter, who is developing an interest in basketball, and it was a bit tedious for us both.
 In These Girls Hope is a Muscle July 26, 2008
Great book - arrived in a timely manner and in great shape -- looked like new.
Excellent book! December 18, 2007
There are more high school girls in sports today than ever before. Unfortuantely, the sports literature has not quite kept pace. This book helps rectify that situation. Madeleine Blais tells a great story of persistence, teamwork, and drive that all students need to learn if they are to succeed in a world based on competition. She writes with a journalist's eye and it is easy for the reader to place the team's quest in the larger context of the role of women in American society (but I do not see a feminist agenda being promoted here). A great story told well!
A good true story, a bit dragged out December 2, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I picked up this book and read it because I like sports stories, I work with high school students, and I am on a committee to recommend books for our school reading list. This book is well written, and the author spends a lot of time painting a background for this story - covering both the area (Amherst, MA), and the families of the players. Each anecdote was interesting, but probably 60-80% of this book did consist of "background" anecdotes. And there was not always a strong connection to the story of the girls on the basketball team. And so the story never really picks up momentum. The other flaw was that it was too respectful of the girls. This was fine, and I expected nothing different from a book about high school kids. In Blades of Glory, about high school boys hockey, the players were painted more realistically, warts and all. That was a riveting story about a high school team. This wasn't. With "In These Girls, Hope is Muscle," I felt that I was reading a homage piece, and I did enjoy a good part of that. I'm not sure I will recommend this for a summer reading book. There was enough that might appeal to some girls, though, and I may. This story would have been perfect as an article of 20 pages or so for a magazine. It was overly stretched out to a book length.
Too much information June 19, 2007
I love basketball! I played it and I've coached it. I chose this book to find out the story of a team and how it got its act together to be successful.
Well, I got that information, but it was mixed up with lots of other factoids that I really didn't care about. You were told about the town, the colleges, the weather, the families of the players, the kinds of summer jobs the players had, whether they were popular or not....the list goes on and on.
The writing was descriptive, but I feel like the author just got bogged down by too many details. This book wasn't what I hoped for.
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