Hometown Legend

The coauthor of the blockbuster Left Behind series inks the appealing, happily-ever-after Hometown Legend, about a small town in severe financial straits and its former championship football team, written in a made-for-the-movies style that will earn author Jerry Jenkins some new fans. There are some likable characters in this yarn. Lonely widower Cal Sawyer is juggling several balls at once: raising his teenage daughter Rachel, helping coach the down-at-the-heels Athens City High football team, and trying to keep the American Leather Football Company from going belly up. He doesn’t count on the impact Elvis Presley Jackson will have on the football season–and on his daughter. Bev Raschke, Sawyer’s single, 40-something assistant, has her eye on him, but as Sawyer says, “She’s got two cats, and that’s about all I need to know about a woman.” Romance is inevitable. As the novel unfolds, mostly told in Sawyer’s rambling, Southern drawl, we see trouble brewing in his personal life, on the football team, and with the unfolding of Elvis’s past. But never fear–there’s a happy ending in sight. No loose ends are left dangling, and there’s a heartwarming, feel-good wrap-up with a bit of a spin that will satisfy Left Behind aficionados who enjoy a predestined finish to their leisure reading.