REVIEW: Evvie Drake Starts Over by Linda Holmes
A heartfelt debut about the unlikely relationship between a young woman who’s lost her husband and a major league pitcher who’s lost his game.
In a sleepy seaside town in Maine, recently widowed Eveleth “Evvie” Drake rarely leaves her large, painfully empty house nearly a year after her husband’s death in a car crash. Everyone in town, even her best friend, Andy, thinks grief keeps her locked inside, and Evvie doesn’t correct them.
Meanwhile, in New York City, Dean Tenney, former Major League pitcher and Andy’s childhood best friend, is wrestling with what miserable athletes living out their worst nightmares call the “yips”: he can’t throw straight anymore, and, even worse, he can’t figure out why. As the media storm heats up, an invitation from Andy to stay in Maine seems like the perfect chance to hit the reset button on Dean’s future.
When he moves into an apartment at the back of Evvie’s house, the two make a deal: Dean won’t ask about Evvie’s late husband, and Evvie won’t ask about Dean’s baseball career. Rules, though, have a funny way of being broken—and what starts as an unexpected friendship soon turns into something more. To move forward, Evvie and Dean will have to reckon with their pasts—the friendships they’ve damaged, the secrets they’ve kept—but in life, as in baseball, there’s always a chance—up until the last out.
CW/TW – past gaslighting and emotional abuse
Dear Ms. Homes,
Last year I fell in love with “Back After This”. I like “Evvie Drake” but maybe not quite as much. But major props that Evvie (pronounced as if it rhymes with “Chevy”) isn’t just another earlier version of Cecily from that book.
Evvie feels as if she’s living a lie. On the day she was finally in the process of leaving her husband, she gets a phone call that frees her. But now their small Maine hometown thinks she’s a grieving widow. She’s not but she hasn’t gotten up the nerve to tell anyone. Her best friend Andy (and no, they feel nothing for each other except deep friendship) knows Evvie needs some extra income to pay her bills and introduces her to his friend, a former pro baseball pitcher whose career has ended and who is looking for a place to be out of the spotlight. Evvie and Dean both have a lot of work to do on themselves by the end of the book.
I’d never heard of the term that Dean uses to describe his issues, the yips, but suddenly getting that must be horrible for a pro athlete used to having his body do whatever he wants it to. Evvie seemed to have the perfect marriage but hid from everyone the fact that Tim yelled, denigrated and gaslite her emotionally. Little by little she was shrinking into nothing but finally worked up the guts to suddenly go. But she hasn’t worked up the nerve to tell even her best friend, her father, or anyone else the hell she was living in.
As we discover, Evvie is a “fixer” who wants to solve everyone else’s problems so when she digs into what is bedeviling Dean, she starts pushing him about what he’s done to solve the problem. Well, Dean has done everything and more, as he tells Evvie and his buddy Andy. Nothing has worked and he’s come to terms with it. But he really hasn’t.
So here are two people with their own personal bugbears. They might have promised each other that Evvie’s marriage and Dean’s baseball career wouldn’t be mentioned between them but we all know what’s coming. Frankly Dean comes off better here and for a while, I was more than a bit annoyed with Evvie about circling around Dean trying to get him to try one more thing or believing that she’s some kind of talismen who will cure him. Glass houses, Evvie.
Along the way, they drift into friendship followed by a physical relationship that feels comfortable to them both. However, there’s an end date (sorta) which gets advanced by an argument due to Evvie having hid what she was doing when Tim died and her continued efforts to “fix” Dean. Evvie has to hit emotional rock bottom before finally beginning the examination of her choices and past that she needs to come to terms with.
Dean thought he had accepted his future without playing baseball but maybe he hasn’t. He’s also still got to realize that some of the things that he thinks happened one way, actually might be different. And in the case of his decision to come back home to NYC, this affects Evvie, too. These two truly needed the months-long chance to get themselves in order before trying to deepen their friendship to something more. This is something I really appreciated that the book addressed.
Evvie and Dean are flawed in believable ways and I feel actually needed their … not third act breakup so much as the time and distance required to work on themselves before being ready for a future. Not only did I enjoy them together but all of the other friendships and romances in the book are realistic. Evvie’s relationship with her dad as well as Dean’s with his parents get shout-outs, too. B+
~Jayne
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I really like Holmes’ books, and she’s an entertaining person to follow on Bluesky. I suspect that Dean is based at least partly on Rick Ankiel, a former St. Louis Cardinals pitcher. He was a promising young pitcher who had an infamous flameout during the 2000 playoffs. He threw five wild pitches, left the game, and was never able to pitch in the majors again. He ended up retraining and returning to the Cardinals as a center fielder with a wicked arm. His 2017 memoir is called “Phenomenon: Pressure, the Yips, and the Pitch that Changed My Life.”
I know that Holmes is an avid Philadelphia Phillies fan, so it’s likely that she was well aware of Ankiel’s story.
I love this one. Happy to see it reviewed here and that you enjoyed it. Evvie and Dean felt very real to me and I appreciated the gravity of their situation.
@SusanS: Yikes I just watched a youtube video of those pitches.
@Angie: They did feel well rounded and grounded characters.
This does sound good, so thank you, Jayne. I’ve also seen the yips mentioned concerning gymnasts.
@Kareni: I remember the stories about Simone Biles having the twisties.
Yes, here’s an article from 2021 that has both terms in the headline ~ https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/30/opinion/culture/simone-biles-olympics.html
Hmmm, great review Jayne, but it left me wondering why her publishers were reissuing the book. It first came out in 2019, and I read it, and loved it, in the summer of 2020′
Anyway, glad to see it is finding a new audience.
@Barb in Maryland: Oh, it’s not a reissue. It’s just me finally reading a book I already own. ☺