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Book Review of Wait Till Next Year : A Memoir

Wait Till Next Year : A Memoir
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WAIT TILL NEXT YEAR is the story of a young girl growing up in the suburbs of New York in the 1950s, when owning a single-family home on a tree-lined streat meant the realization of dreams, when everyone knew everyone else on the block, and the children gathered in the streets to play from sunup to sundown . The neighborhood was equally divided among Dodger, Giant, and Yankee fans, and the corner stores weere the scenes of fierce and affectionate rivalries.

We meet the people wo influenced Goodwin's early life: her father, who emerged from a traumatic childhood without a trace of self-pity or rancor and who taught his daughter early on that she should say whatever she thought and should bring her voice into any conversation at any time; her mother, whose heart problems left her with the arteries of a seventy-year-old when she was only in her thirties and whose love of books allowed her to break the boundaries of the narrow world to shich she was confined by her chronic illness; her two older sisters; her friends on the block; the local storekeepers; her school friends and teachers. The narrative begins in 1949 at the dawn of a glorious era in baseball, an eaa that saw one of the three New York teams competing in the World Series every year, an era when the lineups on most teams remained basically intact year after year, allowing fans to extend loyalty and love to their chosen teams.