The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach, 2011

One of The New York Times's Top 10 books of 2011, The Art of Fielding is a coming of age story set in the Midwest.

The story centers around a gifted baseball player, Henry Skrimshander, whom fellow baseball player Mike Schwartz mentors, pushes and transforms.

Seemingly destined to spend his life in his small South Dakotan hometown, Skrimshander finds himself enrolled in a small Wisconsin private college where Schwartz is the baseball team captain.

The story includes three other characters whose lives are interwoven as Skrimshander reaches his peak and then falls from grace.

The title, The Art of Fielding, refers to a book that Skrimshander treats as his bible and is so convincingly described and quoted, that I believed it to be an actual book.

The characters are engaging and by the final few chapters, the tension was so high that I couldn't stop reading.  The story lines and characters were never confusing and it was easy to relate to each of the main characters.

Having attended a small college and befriended some of the athletes, the characters and observations ring true as well.

That said, the book did not meet my expectations given its distinction as one of the Top 10 and Top 5 Fiction books of 2011.