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By (author) Arley McNeney
Categories: Fiction
Publisher: Thistledown Press
Paperback : 9781897235287, 480 pages, April 2007

Excerpt

"Finally," I told my doctor when he gave me the booklet, "an instruction manual to my body. Why didn't I get one of these thirty-two bloody years ago?"

The book has stern warnings not to engage in any high-risk tango or salsa dancing. Lawn bowling: yes. Intercourse that involves "unnecessary bending over": no. ("What exactly constitutes 'unnecessary?'"Quinn asked. )

It was natural to see my hip as a bawdy house: skin like heavy curtains over the secret creaking of joints. My hip with its red-light-district throb of inflammation when I walk, heartbeat misplaced there. My heart not in the right place, too close to the groin.

Description

Nolan Taylor must confront her life after basketball, and discover what it takes to endure the physical and emotional pain in rebuilding her self-awareness.
Nolan Taylor is a thirteen-year veteran of the Canadian women’s wheelchair basketball team. Her position as "Big Girl" on the team belies her fragility when her decision to retire and undergo a long overdue hip replacement throws her into a post-retirement identity crisis. Spurred on by pain and a numbing domesticity with longtime love, Quinn McLeod, she retreats into her memory, reliving her rookie year and emerging sexuality with her much older mentor, Darren Steward. As Nolan struggles to maintain her tenuous connections to the people around her in the midst of physical anguish, we are reminded that, despite our bodies’ limitations, we have physical needs that we are driven to fulfill, and the adrenaline that pushes professional athletes can be harnessed to allow what may seem impossible.