"The Throwback Special" a Nat'l Bk Award Finalist by Chris Bachelder is a Winner

The term chick flick or chick lit denotes a genre geared to the feminine gender.  "The Throwback Special" is a gender bender that seems directly aimed to males that throws a Haily Mary of a story that is caught by readers of both sexes; football fans or not.  Chris Bachelder's hilarious novel was a finalist for the Nat'l Bk Award last year.  This winning novel that is both wry & wise from start to finish.  The novel covers 22 male characters.  Each are given their own playtime in the spotlight.  This motley mix of men convene annually to re-enact Lawrence Taylor's brutal tackle on Joe Theisman in a 1985 game causing a gruesome & career ending leg injury.  Each year these guys feel compelled to gel together as a tribe in hotel to conduct ritualistic customs leading to a simulated short scrimmage of this disturbing play from an NFL Monday night game (co-anchored by OJ Simplson & Frank Gifford?)  Therein lies the quandaries of life - "Life is a precious gift, sure, but usually what life is, is going to the store to buy a stupid piece of shit-ass hardware, and then buying the wrong size."  Bachelder has a scorching talent for satirical calls.  All the men have their hang-ups, wistful envies and astute commentaries; especially on marriage.  "Marriage guarantees that one person is watching," eliminating the possibility that one's own existence might go unnoticed.  The 22 madcap players all tussle to dominate at some point by force or deception.   Individually, they all make scoring observations.  The only black male in the group thinks "white people need to be aware of the subtext of race."   The most morose among the men wonders "How do you enjoy something that has, by virture of being, commenced its ending."  "The Throwback Special" is a hilarious & sophisticated psychological game that succeeds at "converting vast quantities of crude ridicule into tiny nuggets of sentiment."  The competition for the 2016 Nat'l Bk Award had to have been heavily stacked to have gotten the win.