Book Review: Home or Away

Synopsis:

Once Leigh and Susy were close friends and teammates bound for Olympic hockey gold. But when Leigh’s sure-fire plan to make the final roster backfired, she left everything behind — including the one person who knew her secret — and started a new life.

Two decades later, Leigh is a successful investment banker living in Florida. She’s happily married and their son is a hockey prodigy. When a career opportunity means moving the family back to Minnesota, Leigh takes the shot for her kid.

Back in the ultra-competitive world she left behind, the move puts her in Susy’s orbit. It’s a daily reminder of how Leigh watched from the sidelines as her former teammate went on to Olympic glory.

Despite the coldness between them, Susy can’t help but hope that Leigh might lace up her skates and join her in the coaches’ box. After all, Leigh knows better than anyone how hard it is to be a woman in the world of competitive hockey. Soon Susy’s talented daughter, Georgie, a “girl athlete,” will be relegated to the B team where she will be afforded less support and fewer opportunities to advance than her male counterparts.

Leigh believes keeping Susy at arms’ length is the only way to conceal her history with their former coach, Jeff Carlson. When he hints of new favors in exchange for her son’s ice time, Leigh is caught in an uncomfortable bind. She can come clean about what happened when she was an Olympic hopeful . . . and risk her marriage. Or she or play Jeff’s game.

In a moment of desperation, Leigh realizes the one person she thought was her biggest competitor — her former teammate — might turn out to be her biggest ally.

Home or Away is the story of two friends, one Olympic dream, and the choice that stood in the way. Author Kathleen West examines overcoming the past, confronting the future, and the sustaining bonds of female friendship.

Review:

Kathleen West is the author of Minor Dramas and Other Catastrophes and Are We There Yet? A lifelong Minnesotan with more than twenty years’ experience as a schoolteacher, she continues teaching English while focusing her writing on motherhood, ambition, competitive parenting, and work-life balance.

West describes Minneapolis as “the perfect place to write a hockey book. . . . Minnesota is the state of hockey.” It is an integral part of the school and youth culture, and West herself is a hockey mom. Her children fell in love with the sport and she has spent a decade in hockey rinks. Even so, she had to conduct significant research to educate herself about coaching and playing hockey. In addition to the fact that “Minnesota and hockey go together,” she chose to focus the story around it because children begin playing at a very young age in order to excel at it. And hockey requires players to master several different skillsets, including skating and stick handling, in addition to game strategy. West found the intensity inherent in the sport important for her characters’ traits, life choices, and reactions to what they experience.

The story is told from four characters’ perspectives. At the center of the tale is Leigh, who grew up in Minneapolis playing competitive hockey and, along with her good friend and teammate, Suzy, goes to Lake Placid to train and, hopefully, secure a place on the 2002 Olympic team. For Leigh, competing in the Olympics will be the culmination of years of preparation, and she is singularly focused on her goal. By the time she leaves for the summer, she is in a relationship with Charlie. When she arrives in Lake Placid, she realizes that competition for the team is even more intense than she imagined it would be, but she has attracted the attention of an assistant coach, Jeff Carlson. She believes him when he assures her that, although he does not have final decision-making power, he can definitely influence the selection of Olympic team members. Leigh is young, ambitious, and determined to achieve her goal at any cost. Still, her compromise is not enough and she listens in stunned disbelief as the team members are announced but her name is not called. She returns home to Minnesota dejected and bitter, and literally throws her equipment down the stairs to the basement in her parents’ home. She gives up hockey completely. She persuades Charlie to marry her shortly thereafter and launches her career in investment banking. “She believed that making the Olympic team would make her a worthwhile human being. . . . When she doesn’t, she feels like she has let everyone — and herself — down forever,” West explains.

Worse, Leigh carries a terrible secret that, if revealed, could destroy the life she builds with Charlie in Florida where he works as the assistant manager of a bookstore and toils sporadically on his first novel which, unbeknownst to Leigh uncomfortably parallels her experience. In their marriage, Leigh is the primary breadwinner, and Charlie bears prime responsibility for their household and rearing their nine-year-old son, Gus. Like his mother and Leigh’s brother, who coaches hockey in Minnesota, Gus loves the sport and is excited to move to a place with a more robust youth program.

West also relates the story from Gus’s perspective as he maintains a “Hockey Bible” in which he chronicles his practice times, milestones, and advice received from his coaches. His consternation about competition, fitting in, and his mother’s role in his placement on the team in a division for which he is not sure he is qualified, is endearing and, at times, heartbreaking. West credibly depicts his emotional struggles and voice. He enjoys hockey and knows that his mother, more than anyone, wants him to excel. But is he playing the sport because he is passionately devoted to it and fueled by the same kind of ambition his mother had? Or is he just trying to please his parents by living up to their expectations?

The story is also related from the vantage points of Charlie and Susy. Charlie is affable, devoted to his family, and a bit overwhelmed as he attempts to assimilate into the the world of hockey parents. He wants only the best for Charlie, and looks to Leigh, her brother and his fellow coaches, and the other parents for guidance since he did not play hockey. His passivity and gentle nature both attract and repel Leigh, who finds herself at a crossroads soon after relocating. She is reunited with Susy, who knows the truth about what happened in Lake Placid. She could see that Leigh’s focus was not where it should be and she was not working hard enough. Suzy has remained active in the sport as a coach and mother of a talented daughter who is competing. Susy’s growing friendship with Charlie alarms Leigh, who fears that she will reveal to Charlie what she knows about Leigh’s past. Divorced, Susy finds herself increasingly drawn to Charlie (“the nicest guy in the universe” who looks “like a literal movie star”) and frustrated by Leigh’s actions and the way Susy believes she takes Charlie for granted.

Leigh learns that Jeff has been accused of abusing young, vulnerable female athletes that he coached after that lifechanging summer in Lake Placid, and she is asked to provide information about her experiences. Jeff’s fundamental character traits remain the same as two decades earlier. He is still overbearing and manipulative, and convinces Leigh that he holds the power to influence her son’s success as a competitive player. The secret she has kept for so many years weighs heavily on her, as does her guilt, as she debates whether to accede to Jeff’s demands or risk everything and everyone that she loves by telling the truth.

The most compelling and emotionally resonant aspect of Home or Away is West’s exploration of the power dynamics between male coaches and female athletes. West places Leigh and Susy in the midst of the emergence of women’s hockey in the mid to late 1990’s, culminating in Susy earning a place on the U.S. Olympic team when Leigh did not. Seeing Susy again — an Olympic medalist — churns up feelings that Leigh has refused to confront for twenty years. Coupled with pressure from both Jeff and other women who want her to speak her truth in order to ensure that Jeff is held accountable for his behavior, Leigh must finally reconcile her past at the risk of the life she has built. She is not just wracked with guilt and afraid of the fallout from having the truth exposed. She is also proud and determined not to let her parents and brother down again. After all, her father created a place in her parents’ home where her Olympic medal was going to be displayed and that place has remained empty for twenty years. It represents an empty space deep within Leigh where she has been unable to forgive herself. As West notes, “She refuses to let people in or admit weakness” and her stoicism blinds her to the truth about her behavior in Lake Placid. But at her core, Leigh wants to do the right thing, which forces her to grapple with a stark reality: she has the unique power to aid the young women who have lodged complaints about Jeff’s abuse of power. West deftly examines the nuances of the #MeToo storyline from the viewpoints of Leigh and Susy, as well as the voice of Leigh’s new friend, Nicole, a savvy and assertive attorney. She also compassionately depicts Charlie’s emotional turmoil as pieces of the puzzling truth about his wife and her decisions begin falling into place. Charlie and Leigh eventually grapple with whether their marriage can withstand betrayals and lies through understanding, forgiveness, and abiding love and respect.

Home or Away is at once a charming look at family life in America’s heartland and a searing study of the pressures budding athletes feel to succeed, with internal and external stressors weighing upon them. Between chapters, West inserts emails from the officious team manager to the “Listen Heights Hockey Fam” which are darkly hilarious and frighteningly realistic, demonstrating the extent to which some parents become obsessed with their children’s athletic pursuits. And although West successfully centers the tale around hockey, she could have fleshed out her universal themes within the context of any competitive sport.

West’s characters are multi-layered and believable, and Leigh’s conundrum is both timely and, sadly, timeless. Her dilemmas are relatable, and West skillfully makes every character both flawed and sympathetic so that readers will find themselves taking Leigh, Charlie, Susy and, in particular, little Gus into their hearts and hoping that they can successfully navigate the crisis into which they are thrust.

Home or Away is entertaining, engrossing, and, best of all, a thought-provoking meditation on the quest for success and the limits of compromise in order to achieve it.

Excerpt from Home or Away

Chapter One

Leigh Mackenzie

~~ May 2022 ~~

Leigh ran out of the blue house and flung open the back seat of Charlie’s station wagon. “You’re here!” she shouted. Gus, her nine-year-old, hadn’t even had time to undo his seat belt as Leigh dotted his freckled face with kisses. “Welcome home to Minnesota!”

“Mom!” Gus laughed. He tapped the back of her neck halfheartedly, and Leigh remembered those toddler days when he’d dug his fingers into that same spot. Charlie had pried each digit up in order for Leigh to make it out the door for work.

And now, her son was already pushing her away. “Wait until you see the place with paint!” She spun toward Charlie, who enveloped her.

Charlie held his cheek against hers. “Three months is such a long time,” he murmured. Their temporary separation had been practical. Leigh had started her new job at Lupine Capital in March as an ill-timed retirement left her boss shorthanded. Meanwhile, Leigh and Charlie both thought Gus would be better off finishing third grade in Tampa.

“It was too long,” Leigh agreed as Gus threw an arm around her waist, “but it gave me time to get this place in shape. Come see your room!” She untangled herself from her husband and grabbed his and Gus’s hands.

Leigh had been in the blue house for only a week herself after camping in an Airbnb near her parents’. Now, though most of the Mackenzies’ belongings were still en route from Florida, they had updated bathrooms, a new kitchen, and fresh paint in every room. Plus, Leigh had just finished the hockey zone in the basement, a surprise she’d manufactured for both her son and her husband.

“I already know where my room is,” Gus said. They’d looked at the house ona trip “home,” as Leigh still thought of the suburb in which she’d grown up, the previous winter. As they crossed the threshold, Gus dropped her hand and scrambled up the stairs.

“Did you do okay on the last leg of the drive?” Leigh ran her fingers over Charlie’s handsome stubble. They’d talked several times in the last few days, and Leigh knew the solo road trip had been taxing.

Charlie rubbed Leigh’s biceps, and her skin tingled. “I skipped the Iron Furnace in Illinois, which was clutch,” he said. “Turns out that even for me, there’s a limit to how many historical markers I’m willing to appreciate.”

Leigh laughed. Gus had complained loudly on speakerphone about stops at various roadside attractions. “I’m so happy you’re finally here.”

“Me too.” Charlie kissed her. He tasted familiar, like coffee and peppermint.

“The green is awesome!” Gus bounded down the stairs. “Does Uncle Jamie say it’s Lions green?” Gus had been obsessed by Liston Heights Lions hockey since he was a toddler. Leigh’s brother, the boys’ varsity coach, kept him well stocked in old practice jerseys.

“He says it’s perfect.” Leigh raised her eyebrows. “Speaking of perfect, are you two ready for your surprise?”

“Surprise?” Gus balled his hand into a fist and bit a knuckle, clearly excited.

“I did something cool in the basement.” Leigh pointed at the door that led to the wide-open furnished space downstairs. Gus sprinted ahead and Leigh pushed Charlie’s shoulder. “Go see,” she urged.

“You didn’t tell me about this.” She could smell Charlie’s Old Spice wafting behind him and felt overcome by a desire to snuggle in, to let him hold her as they watched something easy on television and sipped drinks. In all their years together, they’d never before spent so much time apart as they had that spring.

“Holy hockey balls!” Gus shrieked from below. She could hear his shoes squeaking on the synthetic ice tiles she’d installed.

“Whoa,” Charlie said, catching up. Leigh had transformed the room into a hockey practice facility with a special shooting surface, net, and custom paint job. She’d even ordered decals of several Minnesota Wild players and adhered them to the walls. “When did you have time to do this?” Charlie asked.

Leigh worked a zillion hours a week at Lupine. Between the travel and the research, she had called in a favor from her brother to finish Hockey Zone. “Jamie,” she confessed. Her little brother had spent several hours in the Mackenzies’ basement, painting the baseboards yellow to simulate a real rink. Leigh had attached a shooting tarp over the net she’d ordered, a picture of a goalie printed on it. When she’d stood back to admire the setup, she had an unexpected desire to shoot on it herself although she hadn’t laced up in twenty years.

“My stick is in the car!” Gus ran for the stairs, but Leigh stopped him.

“Jamie left you one of his old ones.” She pulled the well-worn Bauer with fresh green tape from its place against the wall. “He also left you these pucks.”

“Oh, sick!” Gus overturned the bucket she’d handed him, the pucks scattering in a four-foot radius. “Mom, you can even bend your stick against this stuff!” He grinned at them over his shoulder as he pressed the stick into the tile. Pucks sailed.

“The wall,” Charlie whispered, as the third shot missed the net entirely and thunked into the drywall.

“We’ll repaint.” Leigh shrugged, remembering the myriad holes she’d put in her own parents’ basement walls. “It’ll be a while before his slapshot is hard enough to do any real damage.”

Charlie nuzzled her ear. “I love it when you talk dirty to me.”

Leigh giggled and led him up the stairs, leaving Gus to practice. “Let me show you your new office. I said they had to finish the wallpaper before you got here.”

“Did you use shark tone?” Charlie tapped her butt cheek as they climbed the second flight. That’s what he called her work voice, the one she used for final negotiations.

“Sure did.” Leigh pulled him into the empty room they’d decided would be Charlie’s study. “I can see you in here, babe,” Leigh said, “writing your great American novel.”

She hoped Charlie could see it, too, could envision himself glancing up from his manuscript out of the row of south-facing windows at their spacious backyard. Charlie had spent so much time with Gus in the last decade, so much time managing the household and Little Lights Bookstore, where he’d worked for years. He’d hardly done any writing since Gus had been born, though it used to be his passion.

Leigh hoped the move back home would be a fresh start for all of them.

Charlie wandered over to the accent wall and touched the banana-leaf pattern, the same he’d used at Little Lights. The wallpaper had become a mainstay on literary Instagram, with authors posing in front of it whenever they passed through south Florida.

Charlie grinned. “I love it.” At forty-two, he was still a ringer for Matthew McConaughey, his double dimples every bit as endearing as her favorite movie star’s. Leigh’s stomach flipped, and she blushed although they’d been together for more than half their lives. She’d missed him.

“Good spot for your desk?” she asked.

Instead of answering, he pulled her toward him again and put a palm against the back of her head.

Leigh was so relieved that he was finally here that she felt like crying. “Thank you for doing this,” she whispered. “For moving back here, for driving Gus all the way. I have a really good feeling about Minnesota, especially now.”

“Are you kidding?” Charlie kissed her temple. Leigh melted against him. Months of tension-the stress of starting her new job and coming home to an empty house-dissolved. “You were right about Liston Heights,” Charlie said. “It’s an amazing opportunity. For all of us.”

“Good hockey setup, right?” As she rested her head on Charlie’s shoulder, she imagined Gus in his new jersey, celebrating his first goals with his new team.

Sometimes, Leigh still couldn’t believe that she had managed to raise a hockey fanatic. When she’d learned she was pregnant, she decided she’d keep her child from skating, an insurance policy against the heartbreak she had experienced at the top of the sport. But her brother had gifted Gus a pair of toddler skates without giving her a heads-up. Her parents had once again installed their backyard rink, and no one could get Gus to come inside on their winter visits home, even with the promise of Santa.

Regardless of her best intentions, by age five, Leigh’s son was a superstar in the Tampa Junior Lightning House League. In the most recent season, he’d averaged more than a goal per game.

Gus was clearly talented (a prodigy, his biased uncle said), but Leigh and Charlie balked at the more intense Florida programs that required national travel to find top-level competition for the kindergarten set. In Minnesota, hockey was different. So many kids played the sport that you could find great competition at every park in the Twin Cities metro area.

When an offer of a managing director position at Lupine Capital materialized, Leigh found herself yearning for home. She imagined Gus in a Liston Heights Hockey uniform just like the one she had worn. Though the end of her athletic career had been miserable, the beginning had been magical. Hockey was Minnesota’s hometown game, with whole suburbs turning out to cheer on the high school stars. Youth associations like Liston Heights fielded ten teams per age group. There was so much room for Gus to grow here.

As she had described the possibilities to Charlie, he caught her enthusiasm. He’d experienced the culture, too, although from the outside. Leigh had taught him the game when they’d watched her brother’s high school team. And after ten years in Florida, Charlie was eager to ditch the unrelenting heat. There were bookstores and coffee shops in Minnesota, too, he said. He could finish his novel anywhere.

“The basement is awesome,” Charlie said now, still holding her. “Did you work on finding him a summer team?”

Leigh flinched. This was the hiccup. Moving back had left Leigh with the uncomfortable task of getting in touch with her old teammates and hockey contacts. Leigh was counting on their loyalty, even though she’d left the sport behind on the same day she’d flown home from the Lake Placid Olympic Training Center in 2001. Not six hours after the final cut for the Salt Lake team, she’d catapulted her Minnesota Gophers duffel from the top of her parents’ basement stairs onto the concrete below. She’d javelined her stick down there, too, the blade bouncing against the floor. Leigh wished the stick would have at least splintered, if not snapped.

It had been twenty years since Leigh had ghosted everyone after being cut from the team, including Susy Walker, her former best friend, and also their old coach, Jeff. Instagram told her they both lived in Liston Heights. Leigh had thought moving home would be worth it-Lions hockey was the best, and Gus deserved his shot-even though she’d been so careful about keeping her old life separate from the one she built with Charlie and Gus.

Now that she was here, they were all so close to the truth of her past. She had her first moments of doubt as she pulled away from Charlie and led him back to the main floor of their new home.
“Too late for a real summer team,” Leigh said over her shoulder. “But Jamie and I got him in with that hotshot coach. First session is next week.”

Charlie nodded and walked into the kitchen. From there, they could hear Gus’s stick tapping in the basement, the regular thuds of pucks against the shooting tarp. “Last night, I was checking out the Liston Heights Hockey Association page,” he said. “You know that your old coach is on the board, right? Jeff Carlson? It says he coached the national team when you were on it, but I didn’t really recognize him.”

Leigh turned away from her husband and opened the refrigerator. She’d done the same Google search and had read the article about Jeff and Susy coaching together. Jeff had been quoted as saying he “just wanted to pass on the life-changing love of the game to the next generation.”

That line had triggered a sudden surge of rage. The game had changed Jeff’s life, and he’d so casually ruined hers. If Leigh had known what the end of her hockey career would bring-darkness, self-doubt, a band of regret that she could still feel tightening beneath her diaphragm whenever she stepped inside an ice rink-she wasn’t sure she’d ever have started playing. The joy had only just started coming back in the stands, watching her son participate in the sport he loved so much.

Last season, Gus had been obsessed with the spiral notebook that his uncle Jamie had customized for him. In “Gus’s Hockey Bible,” as the cover read, her son tracked his points, his hours on the ice, and the quotes he’d internalized from coaches. He wanted to be the best. In order to have a legitimate chance, he’d have to adapt to the intensity of Liston Heights, the hotbed of Minnesota hockey.

Although they hadn’t talked in years, Leigh knew Susy coached year-round here. She’d seen the Instagram posts. Her old friend and rival stood on the bench, towering over the players, her arms crossed. Leigh had never coached her kid’s team. Though she could watch games from the stands, she’d never been able to get back on the ice after the Olympic selections. Jeff and Susy knew exactly why that was.

“Damn,” Leigh said as she stared into the fridge. “Charlie, I meant to pick you up some IPAs and I forgot.”

“It’s no problem-” Leigh spun around and caught her husband’s look of disappointment. She had ordered pizza for the three of them to be delivered in forty-five minutes. After the road trip, Charlie certainly deserved a beer alongside his pepperoni.

Leigh cut him off. “It’s five minutes away,” she said. “And I’m almost out of gin, too. I’ll be right back.” She pointed at the new sectional she’d ordered for the family room. “Take a load off.”

Chapter Two

Susy Walker

~~ May 2022 ~~

Susy went straight from the handoff with her ex-husband in the high school parking lot to the liquor store closest to her townhome. Since her new place didn’t have a cavernous pantry and sleek beverage cooler, she made more frequent trips to the store than when she and Dirk had been married. But it had been easy to downsize after he finally admitted to sleeping with half of the Swedish national hockey team.

Susy studied the six-packs on the usual shelf. She always picked the same Fat Tire. It wasn’t as basic as her old go-to Rolling Rock, but it wasn’t fussy, either. After she paid, the bell rang over the door, and Susy glanced up. Leigh Mackenzie walked in. Susy dropped her wallet. She’d imagined a million times running into Leigh. After all they’d been through, Leigh evaporated after Lake Placid, as if not making the Olympic team erased all of their years of friendship. This was definitely Leigh now, though-brown curls, straight back, pointy chin. Susy thought of her even more frequently since the flurry of messages had crowded the ’02 and ’06 Olympic team group chats the previous spring. Someone had finally lodged a formal complaint against Jeff Carlson after years of rumors. Leigh, as she was absent from the Team USA alumni groups, likely had no idea.