Home or Away

March 1, 2022
A 42-year-old woman who almost-but-not-quite made the Olympic hockey team decades ago moves her family back to her hometown of Liston Heights, Minnesota, to give her 9-year-old son a chance to play youth hockey at a high level. Leigh Mackenzie is an investment banker married to her college boyfriend, Charlie. She's spent decades hiding from the memories of what happened when she unsuccessfully put everything on the line to make the Olympic ice hockey team at the Lake Placid Olympic Training Center in 2001. Now, after 20 years of marriage, she decides to uproot her family's life in Tampa and take a new job in her old hometown so her son, Gus, can play hockey at a higher level--despite the fact that the move will put her right in the middle of the group of people she's been avoiding since her failed the Olympic trials. Susy Walker is Leigh's former teammate, the former best friend Leigh ghosted after Lake Placid, and she's currently assistant coach of the best youth hockey team in the area. Charlie is a stay-at-home dad with the looks of Matthew McConaughey, a partially written novel, and full devotion to his wife and child. Nine-year-old Gus is a Tampa hockey superstar who's coming to terms with the fact that when it comes to youth ice hockey, Florida-good is nothing like Minnesota-good. The book unfolds from each of these four characters' points of view, providing an excellent, deeply layered story that explores how ambition, hope, and dedication impact the choices people make, the secrets they hold close, and the lies they tell themselves and others. It's also about powerful women supporting each other, friendship, parenthood, marriage, attraction, sexual harassment, and the all-encompassing world of high-level youth--and Olympic--sports. An engrossing, painfully honest story about how far some people will go to chase success.

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March 7, 2022
In West’s charming latest (after Are We There Yet?), a former Olympic hopeful moves her family back to her Minnesota hometown in hopes of giving her nine-year-old son his best chance to play hockey. Two decades earlier, Leigh MacKenzie was cut from the 2002 U.S. women’s Olympic hockey team despite reassurances from her coach, Jeff Carlson, that she’d get a spot in return for sexual favors. Now, with a member of the 2014 team having filed a complaint against Jeff for sexual misconduct, and Jeff pulling the strings for the junior team, he gets Leigh to write a letter of support in exchange for a jersey for Gus. She also reconnects with an old friend and teammate, Suzy Walker, the only one who knows the truth about how Jeff treated Leigh. Suzy won two Olympic medals, but she covets Leigh’s steady marriage with Charlie, “the nicest person in the universe.” Gus, meanwhile, logs his ice time religiously in his “Hockey Bible,” hoping to please his family and coaches. While a few too many hockey practices and Leigh’s perseverating on her past relationship with Jeff drag on the narrative, West makes palpable her characters’ love for the game. This offers a sincere and thoughtful study of dedication and sacrifice. Agent: Joanna MacKenzie, Nelson Literary.

September 1, 2022

West (Are We There Yet?) takes readers deep into the world of competitive sports. Leigh and Susy were once best friends, teammates on an elite women's hockey team headed for the Olympics. Looking to guarantee a spot on the Olympic team, Leigh feels her only way to do that is to have a relationship with the coach. When that doesn't work, she gives up on her dreams. Twenty years later, she returns to her hometown so her son, Gus, can pursue his own hockey dreams. Leigh is reunited with Susy and, despite her best efforts not to be, is swept back into the world of competitive hockey. This forces her to face the reality of what happened long ago. This novel explores what happens when players are coerced and taken advantage of by those who hold positions of power. Cassandra Campbell brings Leigh to life as she explores her own feelings, and the effect on her family regarding the choices she was forced to make years ago. VERDICT Though it's heavy on the sports talk, West's story is really about the love of the game. This novel explores timely events with heart.--Elyssa Everling

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from February 1, 2022
Leigh Mackenzie knew it'd feel like stepping into another world when she walked into the Liston Heights hockey arena, but this time she wasn't the one lacing up her skates. After Leigh's nine-year-old son, Gus, became obsessed with hockey, the family moved back to Minnesota to give him the year-round ice time he craved. Leigh's own love of hockey in her youth and single-minded determination nearly led to a spot on the U.S. Olympic Team, until a disastrous training camp at Lake Placid ripped her dream away. West (Are We There Yet?, 2021) immerses readers in the competitive world of Minnesota youth hockey as Leigh reexamines the sporting culture she once loved above all else, and a relationship with her coach that she thought of as consensual because she was of age. With alternating narrators, West sets Gus' youthful exuberance against Leigh's hesitant acceptance of her past, and in the process gives Leigh the agency to understand her own history as a desperately focused young individual at the mercy of a power-hungry coach. This nuanced, heartfelt novel exploring abuses of power in sports will appeal to fans of Hannah Orenstein's Head over Heels (2020) and Alena Dillon's The Happiest Girl in the World (2021).

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