All The Way Home

G.P. Putnam & Sons, 1984

In 1963, when I was eleven, the first-ever girls’ softball league was created in my town. My team was called the Robins–it was all birds and flowers. We weren’t allowed to steal or over-run a base. If your white blouse came untucked from your (ironed, pleated) jeans, you could be thrown out for not tucking it back in quickly. We played seven innings.

But still, it was a radical thing. I played second base. I wasn’t much of a hitter but I could catch and I wasn’t afraid of the ball. I was an All-Star. It was my one athletic experience in my life, and it lasted for me for only two years. But it was only a matter of time before I had to write a novel about softball. Not girls. Grownups. Small-town women, most of whom never played a sport before. And then they do.

Praise & Reviews

“The story is focused on Gussie Cabrini, an ex-professional athlete who returns to Currys Crossing, Mass., and struggles to rebuild her life after a devastating accident. Against all odds, she transforms a motley crew of nonathletes into the Spurs, the town’s first women’s softball team, which ultimately alters the lives of the players as well as their families…The dialogue has a believable ring and Ms. Cooney has a nice feel for the psychology of women.”
—New York Times Book Review

“Add All the Way Home (which is even better than Cooney’s winning first novel, Small-Town Girl) to the lineup of superb fiction about sports. Or make that just superb fiction. What will knock you out the most, with their amazing grace and gusto, are the passages about softball itself. Not since I last read Updike on Ted Williams have I encountered a crack-of-the-bat home run as deliriously satisfying.”
—Boston Magazine

“Ingeniously plotted. All the Way Home is an exciting, down-to-the-wire softball saga, as well as a lively tale of self-empowerment. Ellen Cooney is playing on her keen sense of the funny and the poignant and the true. And she’s playing to win.”
—Ms.