Author Description

A moving, sometimes hilarious account of a family trying to hold itself together, A Stone of the Heart chronicles the dysfunction of a Queens, New York, Irish-Catholic family. Set in 1961, the book is narrated by the family's oldest son, fourteen-year-old Michael--overweight and obsessed with baseball statistics--who is trying to come to grips with his parents' disastrous marriage, his younger brother's retreat into silence, and his grandparents' faltering efforts to help. In baseball Michael finds the orderliness and clarity lacking in his personal world; but when Roger Maris's sixty-first home run at the end of the season both does and doesn't break Babe Ruth's record, he comes to a tenuous understanding of life's shades of gray, enabling him to begin to forgive his alcoholic father and feckless mother.