It's How You Play the Game
A Novel
Jimmy Gleacher

New American Library
March, 2003
Trade Paperback/256 pages
ISBN: 0-451-20780-7
Buy This Book
www.amazon.com

 

" . . . one of those rare sensitive men who writes great literary fiction for both genders. "

" . . . his writing style and voice has a freshness and honesty . . . "

" . . . a writer with depth and staying power. "

I have a writer friend who says she writes fiction for women and sensitive men. Jimmy Gleacher, author of It’s How You Play the Game, is one of those rare sensitive men who writes great literary fiction for both genders. His debut novel is contemporary and compelling, his characters are as multi-layered as the story he tells, and his writing style and voice has a freshness and honesty that we (women, that is) typically don’t expect from a male author.

 

 

While it initially appears that this book is a love story, it is much more. It’s about a young man’s search for self-identity and resolution of his past and his relationship with his gambling father who abandoned him and his mother. Hope, his fiancé and later his wife, faces almost the same demons as she seeks to find herself and peace with her mother who blames Hope for her father’s death. Each feeds off the dysfunction of the other and although their marriage fails, Jack succeeds in closing the chapter on his relationship with his father and opening the door that leads back to his first true love, Breach.

 

Gleacher delves into the psyches of his characters with such crispness that he has proven to be a writer with depth–and staying power.
Reviewer: E. M. Kurecka