Review of Vern Turner's novel, Meadows and Minefields Vern Turner's first novel, Meadows and Minefields, is especially interesting to me, as I was in his class at a northeastern Ohio high school and know the people on which the novel is partially based. So of course some of my initial interest was in trying to figure out who this or that character was based on. Some were simple (the football coach was my football coach). Others I didn't get. But be that as it may, what is really interesting here is a narrative of a young boy and a young man, Burt (based on Vern), fighting to establish his own identity and carve out his own arc in 1950s working-class America. Burt is denied the right to play the sport that he excels in, baseball. He fights this, loses in regard to playing on the high school team but gets revenge against his denier in a semi-professional league. Vern's description of Burt's father's efforts to defend him and his own successful revenge are no clichéd sportstalk; they show insight into the real life of that time and I felt taken back to that time and place once again, a time and place very dear to me, but with new insights. It is also highly interesting that Burt, as Vern himself, is able to carve out an identity and a career (or part of a career, as Vern seems to have established multiple careers in his real life) while being denied the ability to play the one sport at which he was highly competitive. For some, this denial might have been emotionally crippling, given how important socially sports stardom was then, and his skill as a pitcher would have brought that stardom to him. But this did not destroy Burt, who becomes an athletic manager, the one who does all the dirty work for the coaches but also, in this case, determinedly teaches himself and demands to be taught, the more difficult medical aspects of the job. With the mentorship of the football coach (showing a side of that man that I had not known, though I did hold him in good esteem), Burt becomes a very skilled (while formally untrained) medical practitioner. He accomplishes this not in the midst of clichéd moralistic lectures by the author, but just by knuckling down and learning the labor, learning through the labor, of the job. This part of the story was very inspiring to me. And very true, in my view, because I was one of those football players that Vern worked on and he never made histrionic moans about his baseball skills being suppressed; I didn't even know about them! He just tackled the job at hand and did it. It is rare to see a novel which describes a young worker teaching, and being taught, a difficult skill while having his other, beloved, skill denied. In this review I just wanted to focus on this very vibrant and living part of the narrative. A tip of my “Northlake” hat to my old buddy, Vern Turner.