Stanley Gordon WestCritiques

Writing was beautiful and enjoyable to read, but the story just drug on too long (over 500 pages). DNF, though I read about 250 pages that I enjoyed, but then became repetitious and monotonous.

A story about helping someone who needs it bad with limited means, by the at this point criminally-underrated writer Stanley Gordon West, this book was a workout. With all the stuff going on in my personal life while reading it, I feel like I was running all the icy streets and doing all the time. Impressively funny, fun, intense, scary, sad and real, highly recommended. This is the kind of stuff kids should be made to read to graduate high school.

High school boy tries to keep his family together, in 1949 St. Paul, after his mother dies and his father starts drinking.

Actually, I didn't read the whole book. I only got 1/4 way through and couldn't take it. It was dull and slow moving. I wanted to like it, as it was a local story taking place in St. Paul in the 40's but I decided not to waste my time on books that don't catch my interest.

Summary: The setting is a very small Montana town, where Sam the English teacher is going to be the basketball coach one last time. Sam takes on the responsibility of coaching a number of kids from all different backgrounds. This story follows the loss of the basketball team, the life of Sam, and how some small town kids make it in their day to day lives.

Personal Response: I don’t normally like sports books, but this book is anything but. This book is a heartwarming story love and loss, and beating all of the odds. This book will be one of my favorite books of all times. West describes the small Montana town to a tee, and beautifully describes what it is like to go to school in a very small town.

Curriculum Connection: I would suggest this book for teenagers who play some kind of sport. This book would be a great read about what it is like to belong to a team and how to overcome when the odds are stacked against you.

Summary – Sam became the basketball coach in Willow Creek to escape what was going on in his life. He never expected the strength and passion of the people he met there to change his life forever. The kids’ bravery and unwillingness to quit motivate Sam to do the same. The basketball team goes on to win the state tournament and encourage the small town to keep living.

Personal Response – This is one of my favorite books because the characters and writing is so real. I instantly became sucked into life in Willow Creek and the humor, passion, loss, and determination will touch your heart. This book is also based on a true story and I think that makes it easier to relate to.

Curricular Connections – Although this book has some touchy real life issues that the characters are dealing with, I think it could still be used in a high school English classroom. This could be an assigned reading book or a choice reading book to look at real life in a small town. It could also be used as a book study with high school students doing a history project on Montana.

Interesting read. Not my usual genre but the title caught my eye & I brought it home from the library. Small town basketball team with more guts and luck than sense and resources. I was drawn to it by other circumstances, but those for the most part were left unsettled. How did the a*hole father fare in the long run? What about his son? Central characters at the beginning were sacrificed for the game, ie, the Painter brothers, Pete & his grandmother. Still, over 500 pages & I did finish it in like 4 nights. Maybe I like basketball more than I realized.½

I completely lost my heart to this book. The title of this book is taken from an old American Indian legend: A group of Crow warriors returning from a hunt finds that all of the inhabitants of their camp have died from typhoid. In the belief that they will join their loved ones in the afterlife, they blind their ponies and ride them off a cliff.

The book starts out with the line “Hope is hard to come by in the hard-luck town of Willow Creek. Sam Pickett and five young men are about to change that”. Willow Creek's high school basketball team is the Broncs, commonly referred to in town as the glue factory, with an unbelievable record of 0-93 over the past five years. Their outstanding accomplishment is "fielding five standing, breathing boys" to form a basketball team. When Olaf Gustafson, a 6' 7" exchange student from Norway, and Peter Strong, an excellent basketball player who has come to live with his grandmother this year, Sam thinks it just might be possible to break that record.

They win. They lose. They play ball. But that's not all. Each of the characters in the book carries a painful past. As they root for the team's hope for success, they become a part of something bigger and better than they are. The story twists and turns in subtle ways, moving through each home, finding the secret so painfully locked in each of the closets. The author filled the town of Willow Creek with characters so vividly cast that they become real as relatives, and their stories were full of humor, passion, loss. and determination. Each one touched me and made me feel like I lived in Willow Creek.

I admit I skimmed the long, in-depth descriptions of the basketball games. I’m glad they were there, since they gave me a sense of what was really happening for the boys, but they aren’t what drew me into the story. The book does have some predictability issues that made absolutely no difference in my enjoyment of the story. Sometimes you read the book you should read at the time you need to read it and that's what happened to me with Blind Your Ponies. Give it try sometime.½

Donny Cunningham is 4'11" at age 17 but that doesn't stop him from living and enjoying life. As the oldest of 4 kids in a home without a mother (she's recently died suddenly) he works 3 jobs, cooks, and "helps raise" his siblings. His Dad is kind and well-meaning but has started to drink after his wife's death. There are tough times (involvement with a "nazi" from Social Services, gangsters pursuing the Dad for bad debts, a girl who is too tall for Donny) but there are good times, too, in this loving, tight-knit Catholic family. This book is old fashioned in every good way.

For the reader who doesn't mind visiting the ethos of the 1930s (gosh!) this is an uplifting story with plenty of pathos and adventure.

This is a YA historical fiction novel, a rare breed. It takes place in 1950's Minnesota, the time when all those MST3K shorts and movies take place. The main plot is about a high school senior who just found out she's adopted (really a black market baby) and wants to find her birth parents. I don't know why any adopted kid would want to do that because there's no way it won't be a disappointment (there's a reason they were given up), but I'm not adopted so I can't say. Maybe I'm just made it's a common plot catalyst. In between sleuthings, she visits an old folks home, goes out with her friends doing things you saw in "American Graffiti", laments about the effects of war, and generally putzes around.

I feel like the story did a lot of pandering to Minnesota native. It makes sure to mention that it's the Snelling streetcar, not just the streetcar that everyone knows and no one needs to mention by name. Also, it takes a long time to get events moving. The first third of the novel, Laura Buggs is trying to get info out of the ninety-year-old lawyer that served as the intermediary. After this she learns that old people are actually kind of cool, like in Recess episode 112 (57a).

On the other hand, it also made me wish I was there, eating chocolate malts and riding streetcars without parents to helicopter. It's an enjoyable read, but I don't feel particularly satisfied after it. There's a real disconnect between the happy optimism of the first 75% and the whip-turn ending. I think it's audience is more for Minnesota senior citizens who will appreciate the old times and a good mystery.

As a Minnesota girl I was happy to get ahold of an author who wrote local. I loved the first novel I read by this author. However Finding Laura Buggs I found disappointing. I just could not warm to the book. I am not sure why the prose was good and the story idea itself was sound. However I struggled with the book. Perhaps because Laura put herself in so many dangerous situations and I just wanted to smack her and say STOP doing that! Or perhaps it was for another reason.

Willow Creek Montana is a small town that can just barely put together a high school basketball team of five boys. Even though the team hasn't won for years and has 93 straight losses, it's the basketball team that makes the townspeople come together during the dark winter nights.

But this year could be different.

There's an uncoordinated 6'11 Norwegian exchange student who has never played basketball and another boy escaping the wreckage of his parents' marriage who comes to town to live with his one armed hippy grandmother. They join the team--the kid who wants to ride bulls in rodeos to escape his drunken father and those who have played their whole high school career without a single win.

The characters and the town itself have detailed back stories including the coach and English teacher Sam Pickett; his assistant coach, Diane; the three legged tomcat that becomes the team mascot, and the bicycle built for two left on the steps of the local cafe thirty years ago.

Packed into a decrepit bus dubbed Rozinante after Don Quixote's nag, the team sets off to tilt at windmills once more.

This was the 2011 book chosen for the One Book Montana statewide read sponsored by Humanities Montana and the choice for my book club in September.

Author Stanley G West self-published this book. His story of the success of this book is much like the story he tells here. He sold this book store to store from the back of his car and when he had sold 40,000 copies, he overcame the impossible and Algoinquin finally picked it up. West has since published other books and had one made into a made-for-TV movie.

This is a great feel good book about dealing with adversity and overcoming impossible odds. The characters are very well done--they are people I have known living in small town Montana. West really captures the small town atmosphere and spirit.

But

I think an editor could have taken this from being a regional sensation to a really good book. At 600 pages, it's very wordy. There are play by play descriptions of a dozen or so basketball games which all but the most dedicated basketball fans will find themselves skimming.

3.8 stars

This is a hard book to review I think because it was hard book to read. This is my first Stanley Gordon West and I have heard great things about him as a writer and maybe this isn't where I should have started, but even though I didn’t love this book it is well written.

This was an interesting look at the abhorrent conditions that some nursing homes were in and the people working in them were sadists and thieves who prey on the weak. It was tough reading at times especially if you have a loved one in a care facility but you couldn’t help but cheer for the residents and hope their big plan would work.

I don’t want to say too much more because I had the ending of this book spoiled on me and it kind of wrecked the rest of the book for me and that may have added to me not liking it as much as I should have.

I will give this author another try as I liked his style but this one was just kind a little better than just ok.

3 stars

This is a great book for the sports-minded individual, especially for the male population. The title is based on an old Indian legend about braves returning to the village and finding the whole village dead from a plague. The braves, not wanting to live, tied a clothe over their ponies eyes to blind them and then rode them over a cliff. The story is set in the winter in Montana in a very small high school. The basketball team has lost over 90 games, and yet they continue to play. Two new players join the team, a 7' Norwegian exchange student and a determined basketball player from Minnesota. The majority of the story follows the basketball season and the frustrations of the team from Willow Creek. The quirky town people show the despair, regret, and longings found in any small town. Each person's story unfolds as the basketball season commences.

I started out enjoying this novel quite a bit but, boy, did it fizzle at about the halfway point. I think it just suffers from the very common "needs an editor badly" malady. It is just so incredibly repetitive in its themes and characters. We find out everyone's motivations pretty early on and we are bonked on the head with that for 400+ more pages. Also, as everyone points out, everyone is just SO perfect, forgiving and wonderful, the teenage kids especially (I simply don't know these kinds of kids - maybe I have to go to Montana). The one evil drunk Dad is pretty cliche. The quirkiness of the characters are all unrealistically endearing (instead of annoying) and the plot all falls together packaged with a beautiful bow. However, I will say, it was a bit refreshing to at least live in a world where people are THIS nice to each other, even though it doesn't really mirror reality. Still, a nice illusion all the same. The high school basketball games too droned on and on and on. A few exciting ones would have held a lot more punch/interest. I actually did not care if they won by the end because I knew, based on how perfect everything was, they would.½

In the small Montana town of Willow Creek is a young english teacher and basketball coach, Sam Pickett. He moved to Willow Creek in the hopes of escaping the memories of his lost wife only to wonder what led him and his fellow neighbors to stay in such a place.
A very great and fulfilling story that brings the reader a sense of hope for all aspects of life. I found myself depressed as much as i found myself cheering for the underdogs Broncs, the basketball team. I thought this was a great story but it is filled with Basketball so anyone who is not a fan of sports might not enjoy the story as much.½

I'm now a huge fan of audio books and Blind Your Ponies is a good example of why. The story is set in Willow Creek Montana and is really a story of overcoming challenges. However a huge background of the story is that it is about a basketball coach and there is a lot of basketball in the story....and I hate basketball. If this had been a book I know I would have put it down. But because it was an audio book with a great narrator, it brought the basketball scenes more to life for me (something my own imaginations voice wouldn't have been able to do) and I was able to enjoy this heartwarming tale. As an audio book I rated it four stars. If I had been required to read it I may have been upset with all the basketball distracting me and unfairly rated it much lower.

Giving a book a 5-star rating is an unusual thing for me to do, but "Blind Your Ponies" deserves those stars, not because it was perfect but because when I was listening to it, I felt like I lived in Willow Creek, Montana, and the characters were my neighbors and my friends (and an enemy or two), and I cared about them and I laughed and then the tears fell and then I'd have my hand over my mouth in shock, and I had to remind myself, it's just a book, it's just a book. To me, That's Entertainment!

a little too many basketball game reports. Int he beginnign it was interesting to get to know the characters but then it blew up in one sports reprot after the other and was not beoivable any more. Too goody. All the kids are perfect in the game all balck and white, not grey zones. I hoped for a little bit more inside of the life ina small town. It is a ok summer read. I think if I would have gotten the book instead of the Cd I would have just flipped over the game reports.

I'm a sucker for a good sports underdog story like Hoosiers and Rudy. Blind Your Ponies is that and so much more. Set in Willow Creek, Montana, a town whose basketball team hasn't won a game in the last five years. The story centers around the coach Sam Pickett but there is huge cast of unique supporting characters that reside in the small town. As Sam tries for one last season to build a winning basketball team, he is also struggling with a past that haunts him. As the story progresses, Sam becomes aware that most everyone in the town has personal challenges too and he looks to them for inspiration.

I became totally absorbed in the story - the characters were all really well-developed and relatable. However, I listened to this book on audio and at times it was hard to keep track of some of the minor characters. Having a paper copy and being able to page back through what I had already read would have been helpful. The other criticism I have is that some of the dialogue was a little over the top and at times a tad cheesy.

Even though this is at heart an underdog sports story, the author kept it from being too predictable - I was still on the edge of my seat at times.

This is a feel-good story about a high school basketball team in the small town of Willow Creek, Montana. Made up of an eccentric mix of characters, including a Norwegian exchange student and a couple boys from troubled homes, the team is led by Coach Sam Pickett. As the team racks up victory after victory, the town rallies behind them. A bit over-sentimentalized and over-romanticized, Blind Your Ponies is still an entertaining and heartwarming read.

Any book with one of the characters is a grandmother who wears a shirt that says " Contents may have shifted due to handling" and a outback hat, can't be all bad. I got the early reviewer copy of books on tape and listen to it while driving. It is taking me a while. I like others, am not found of the reader at all. Also this book reminds me of a Lifetime Movie that is blown up to fill 2 hours when it could have been less than an hour. And I have to say if I am forced to attend yet another basketball game with blow by blow commentary I will blind this pony. I just finished...I am sooo glad. Way too much game commentary and to much explaining of each character. There were some good places that got me emotionally involved. Maybe if you are a baseball fanatic and a chick flick lover you can deal with this.

Ninety-three losses in a row would be enough to discourage most people, but for the boy's basketball team of Willow Creek, Montana these losses help drive them towards a winning season. Coach Sam Pickett has had loss in his own life too with the murder or his wife numerous years prior to the book's start. He's about ready to give up on both life and coaching basketball when a 6-foot-11-inch Norwegian exchange student Olaf comes to town. Along with Olaf's arrival and encouragement from biology teacher and new love interest Diana Murphy, Sam decides to give coaching one more year. Coach Pickett gets six players to join him on his Don Quixote-like quest to take these boys to the state tournament.

Blind Your Ponies is a story about underdogs and about how when even a few underdogs pull together they become strong. Most of the players and townspeople have suffered hard losses and have found the will to pick themselves back up and keep going. It's an uplifting story about individuals becoming a team and about how that one team lifts up and unites an entire town. Stanley Gordon West populates his story not just with the Coach and the players but also with numerous eccentric, complex side characters who add depth and heart to the book--Grandma Chapman, Hazel Brown, Denise Cutter, Mervin Painter, and more.

I have a propensity to enjoy stories about people who overcome adversity and beat the odds, so I thought I would like this book, but I didn't know that I would enjoy it as much as I did. There are some really touching and inspirational moments. Occasionally the writing is a bit overdone and unnatural (particularly when it came to the romantic scenes), but if you can get past those places you'll find a story that's worth your time and will touch your heart.

*I received the audio book version of this story as part of Library Thing's Early Reviewers program.

A book about a tiny Montana town and the scrappy high school basketball team that takes the entire town on the ride of their lives. Being born and raised in Montana I can attest that those little towns all exist and these details added to the interest for me. I think without this background the sheer number of teams and games played may get to be a little much. The pacing of the book is slow and it allows you to envelop yourself in the book but be prepared to listen to/read about a lot of basketball. At first I did not like the narrator but he grew on me by the middle and I felt his voice lent itself well to this story. I'd recommend this book to anyone who enjoys stories of small towns or underdogs or for people looking for a nice, friendly read.½

Overall, I really enjoyed this book. I love stories set in small towns about ordinary people. The author really captured the small town life. I went to a very small grade school and had 12 in my 8th grade class, so I can relate to a small rural school like the one in the book.

I agree with other reviewers that it was reminiscent of "Hoosiers", which I loved. I always want the underdog to win!

But, the reader was very annoying at times, and had it not been that I was drawn in by the quirky characters, I would have turned off the player.