Rating: 
Summary: I live this life
Review: My best friend and I are married to two head coaches at a high school brimming with a fanatical winning football tradition. I bought this book for her when it first was published, and told her to highlight sections she thought were realistic. When we got back together to discuss the novel, we had both highlighted the same sentences over and over again. The novel is written by someone who knows how families, and marriages, get sacrificed on the altar of athletics. I can only shudder at the thought of being married to a college coach. High school level is enough for me. The book completely captures the experience of being necessary for the obligatory parts you need to play at banquets and during appearances with darling children in the stands. Way to go, Nanci.
Rating:
Summary: Touching, realistic portrayal of women
Review: This book was an excellent portrayal of the lives of women and the importance of football in the Southeast. The characters were very true-to life, and this book was so well-written that I really felt for all of the narrators. It was both entertaining and literary, and these two things rarely come together. I've ordered her other two books in the hopes that they are as good as this one.
Rating:
Summary: one of the better
Review: this book was bought on a whim. it was one of the best novels i have ever read. the way nanci kincaid writes is so unique that i was able to see the storyline from so many different positions. it was fantastic. everything about it.
Rating:
Summary: I live this life
Review: This is an interesting book set apart by it's narrative strategy. Each chapter is from the perspective of a different character. Frankly, I found this strategy confusing and difficult to follow. Particularly if you couldn't remember some of the minor characters. That aside, this book does an excellent job of showing what a coach's wife's life is like. Everyone knows coaches work long hours. Kincaid shows the real toll on the family. What's not fully brought out in the publicity of the book is that it also deals with race relations in the south as well as that area of the country's obsession with college football. This book gives another perspective of the vicious tactics used by boosters when a coach is not performing to their expectations. What is also interesting is that Ms. Kincaid is married to Dick Tomey, the Arizona coach who recently resigned after great success because the pressures from fans were just too great. Kincaid's biography touches on the fact that she was previously married to another coach who worked at Alabama (clearly the fictional school in the book) and Arkansas State. My guess is she may have formerly been married to Ray Perkins but none of the articles I read gave her first husband's name. If you know, please email me. In summary, I enjoyed this book and read it in two days. It touches many important points about college athletics and race relations.
Rating: 
Summary: The Unhappy Life of a Coach's Wife
Review: This is an interesting book set apart by it's narrative strategy. Each chapter is from the perspective of a different character. Frankly, I found this strategy confusing and difficult to follow. Particularly if you couldn't remember some of the minor characters. That aside, this book does an excellent job of showing what a coach's wife's life is like. Everyone knows coaches work long hours. Kincaid shows the real toll on the family. What's not fully brought out in the publicity of the book is that it also deals with race relations in the south as well as that area of the country's obsession with college football. This book gives another perspective of the vicious tactics used by boosters when a coach is not performing to their expectations. What is also interesting is that Ms. Kincaid is married to Dick Tomey, the Arizona coach who recently resigned after great success because the pressures from fans were just too great. Kincaid's biography touches on the fact that she was previously married to another coach who worked at Alabama (clearly the fictional school in the book) and Arkansas State. My guess is she may have formerly been married to Ray Perkins but none of the articles I read gave her first husband's name. If you know, please email me. In summary, I enjoyed this book and read it in two days. It touches many important points about college athletics and race relations.
Rating:
Summary: Football - the Southern Religion
Review: What a funny book and what a sad book. There are no bad guys in this book - no male bashing. Everyone's just doing the best they know how. Kincaid clearly knows the life of a football coach and the life his wife must lead. All the women's voices are so powerfully rendered, you will come away with them embedded into your memory as if they were your neighbor, best friend, mother, or rival. Read this book!
Rating:
Summary: Marriage + footall = truth
Review: While there are an awful lot of characters (narrators) in this book, they all combine to tell a great tale of marriage, men, women and misguided ambition. Mac and Dixie have a story, that while told over and over in fiction, is particularly interesting with the college football background. I read this in 2 days.
Rating:
Summary: Any current/former football fan/wife should appreciate this
Review: Wow, Nanci Kincaid understands the scene of a naive-in-love coach's wife. And having been such a wife for nearly twenty years, I clearly see myself, my former spouse, our coaching staffs and teams and players in Kincaid's storyline. This is my second Kincaid read, having started with "Verbena". Having liked it, I was surprised upon perusing amazon.com to find "Balls", and its summary enticed me to order it. I read it in two days. The first person narrative as told by the women of the story, with Dixie as the principle story teller, makes the reader feel at home, as if listening to the story in video clips, a sort of oral history documentary. Experiencing Dixie's maturation from a privileged only child status to the unswervingly loyal, and mostly inept, bride to the veteran wife who maintains her life and her children in the absence of her workaholic coach husband is very touching. It is obvious that Dixie's life mirrors the lives of many women who marry for love, and end up always being second best in their husband's lives, the lives of men who place their career first and foremost. I found it especially ironic when Lilly, the family maid and mother of super successful professional football player, Jett, described the world of coaches and football players as being that of men who never really grow up. That is so true! It is a big business beyond a naive fan's understanding. Living in a football state, having sons who never measured up to the athleticism of their coach father's fondest dreams for them, I clearly understand the emptiness of the life Dixie lives in "Balls". No matter how much she maintains her coach's wife status with dignity and support, her union with Mac Gibbs is a shell, a guise, a front for the public and her children. I especially loved Dixie's devotion to her Christian ways, including huge donations to Unity Prayer, but found great pleasure in her development as a writer and her refusal to further fabricate the Christian legend of her warrior husband coach. The only thing Dixie did not succumb to was the use of the zodiac to help her husband's team win. And of that, even I was guilty while living the life of a coach's wife. There is warmth and humor and some earnest Southern culture in "Balls" and the legendary importance of high school and college sports is right on track. The men, black and white, are not dark, despicable characters, no more than their women are shrews. The integration of the races in athletics is important in this story and the place of football as a stepping stone from poverty to wealth underlies the larger cultural issue. There are shades of moral turpitude being addressed, not just clear cut sanctimonious preachings. In other words, the story is very real. Kincaid's work is not as polished as it may become, but this is a good start in her writer's portfolio. All coaches' wives should read this novel, if they can stand it.
Rating:
Summary: Any current/former football fan/wife should appreciate this
Review: Wow, Nanci Kincaid understands the scene of a naive-in-love coach's wife. And having been such a wife for nearly twenty years, I clearly see myself, my former spouse, our coaching staffs and teams and players in Kincaid's storyline. This is my second Kincaid read, having started with "Verbena". Having liked it, I was surprised upon perusing amazon.com to find "Balls", and its summary enticed me to order it. I read it in two days. The first person narrative as told by the women of the story, with Dixie as the principle story teller, makes the reader feel at home, as if listening to the story in video clips, a sort of oral history documentary. Experiencing Dixie's maturation from a privileged only child status to the unswervingly loyal, and mostly inept, bride to the veteran wife who maintains her life and her children in the absence of her workaholic coach husband is very touching. It is obvious that Dixie's life mirrors the lives of many women who marry for love, and end up always being second best in their husband's lives, the lives of men who place their career first and foremost. I found it especially ironic when Lilly, the family maid and mother of super successful professional football player, Jett, described the world of coaches and football players as being that of men who never really grow up. That is so true! It is a big business beyond a naive fan's understanding. Living in a football state, having sons who never measured up to the athleticism of their coach father's fondest dreams for them, I clearly understand the emptiness of the life Dixie lives in "Balls". No matter how much she maintains her coach's wife status with dignity and support, her union with Mac Gibbs is a shell, a guise, a front for the public and her children. I especially loved Dixie's devotion to her Christian ways, including huge donations to Unity Prayer, but found great pleasure in her development as a writer and her refusal to further fabricate the Christian legend of her warrior husband coach. The only thing Dixie did not succumb to was the use of the zodiac to help her husband's team win. And of that, even I was guilty while living the life of a coach's wife. There is warmth and humor and some earnest Southern culture in "Balls" and the legendary importance of high school and college sports is right on track. The men, black and white, are not dark, despicable characters, no more than their women are shrews. The integration of the races in athletics is important in this story and the place of football as a stepping stone from poverty to wealth underlies the larger cultural issue. There are shades of moral turpitude being addressed, not just clear cut sanctimonious preachings. In other words, the story is very real. Kincaid's work is not as polished as it may become, but this is a good start in her writer's portfolio. All coaches' wives should read this novel, if they can stand it.
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