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Reviewed by:
  • Muckers by Sandra Neil Wallace
  • Elizabeth Bush
Wallace, Sandra Neil Muckers. Knopf, 2013 [288p] Library ed. ISBN 978-0-375-96754-2 $19.99 Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-375-86754-5 $16.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-0-307-98238-4 $9.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 7-10

The copper mine is just about played out in the northern Arizona town of Hatley, and when the Eureka Company shuts down the operation, the local economy will collapse, most residents will disperse, and the schools will lock their doors. This means that 1950 is the last chance for the Hatley Muckers football team to resurrect its glory days, as the last generation of players cleans up the unfinished business left by their older siblings—taking the state title. As in all good sports stories, this is a raggedy, undersized team, and they are distinctive among big-name state high school teams in that the Muckers are integrated; Mexicans may be relegated to the low-end mining jobs, visit the public pool only on designated days, and live in the searing Gulch during the week, but on game days they’re judged [End Page 186] and respected according to what happens on the slag gridiron. Based on events in the town of Jerome, Arizona in 1950, the fictional championship season is seen through the eyes of narrator “Red” O’Sullivan, the quarterback determined to win in memory of his older brother, killed in World War II; Red teeters between loyalty to his home town and best friend, Cruz, and the certainty that his only future lies far away from his hospitalized mother, his drunken father, and a dead end job in another mine. There’s no denying this sounds like a laundry list of familiar sports tropes, but Wallace makes them live and breathe through careful attention to the quotidian details of local geography and universal motivators—guilt, friendship, spite, encouragement, anger, and talent.

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