by Leslie Carroll

Snow flurries that hit you sideways...sleet that threatens to pockmark your face...rain puddles so deep you could send a rubber duckie floating down the bus lanes of Manhattan...what all this foul weather really signifies is that Spring Training is just around the corner!

I've always liked baseball.

Maybe because it's not too hard to understand the game, you can tell what everyone looks like because they're not wearing armor, and because the game isn't about acting like you want to kill or maim the members of the opposing team.

Baseball is pastoral.

It's “America's game.” A family game. And a baseball team is a family in itself, though frequently a dysfunctional one. But find me a functional family, and I'll invite myself over for your next Thanksgiving dinner!

In CHOOSING SOPHIE, I explore all sorts of family dynamics. Olivia deMarley, an unmarried mother who has been estranged from her own father for two decades, reunites with Sophie, the twenty-year-old daughter she gave up for adoption at birth.

Glenn and Joy, Sophie's adoptive parents, struggle with what it means for her birth mother to suddenly enter the picture. Where does Olivia's new fiancé, Tom, fit into the equation--or does he?

And when Olivia is given the opportunity to inherit the Bronx Cheers, her late father-s cellar-dwelling minor league baseball team, a long-smoldering family feud is ignited with teams of deMarleys competing against each other for control of the already dysfunctional unit--the colorful and eccentric Bronx Cheers and its team management.

I think of this novel as a collection of Russian nesting dolls, a larger family story that contains increasingly more compact ones, until we get down to the mother-daughter relationship between Olivia and Sophie.

The New York Post chose CHOOSING SOPHIE as “Required Reading” and Target stores has targeted the novel as one of its “Breakout Books” this year.

Although there is plenty of human growth in the story, I guarantee you an absolutely steroid-free read! Curl up with CHOOSING SOPHIE and a cup of steaming cocoa, and by the time you reach the final page, you'll swear you could hear those heartwarming words--“play ball!”

--Leslie Carroll