Review: beautiful portrayal of love, forgiveness, and growing up
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 06 20, 2011
I don't fish. I don't know anything about how winds might spoil a fly-casting tournament (though okay, I can probably imagine). I don't know anything about baseball either. But Randy Kadish's short story, The Second Fly-Caster, soon pulls me into the world of a young American boy, caught between his mother's desire for him to do well in school and his father's love of fly-casting and the great outdoors.The story's told through the young boy's words and the voice is beautifully beguiling and consistent, from youth to adulthood. Images of Roman gladiators striding to battle, churches weighed down by silence, and snowmen mayors make the narrator and his memories seem vividly real."God, even though I don't always believe in you..." the young boy prays, and his fears are fervently real. He loves his dad, he hates the foe, and he dreads the thought of failure.In the end the enemy's not entirely unexpected, the sadness not entirely salvageable. But a child can still be a hero, and the memory of his father can be a hero's memory. The story spans America and Vietnam, accountancy and the casting of a line, to come full circle, to a place where a man can thank God and truly become all he can be.Disclosure: The author gave me a free ecopy of this story after I reviewed an earlier, equally enjoyable, book.