At eleven a.m. on Saturday, May tenth, the day of the game, sailing barely higher than the prickly dark peak of the town hall roof and the three church steeples competing with each other for sparks from the mild sun, a public relations blimp appeared in the air above Currys Crossing, Massachusetts. It was an utterly soundless gray balloonish thing that dangled from its underbelly a white banner that said, in monstrous red letters, NOBODY BEATS THE BELLES. In the bottom right corner of the banner, just below the outline of a small handbell in a circle, there was a signature in brilliant blue. New England Telephone. A thrill went straight through the town.

    “The message on the blimp, in ‘monstrous red letters,’ claims the invincibility of the Belles, a woman’s softball team sponsored by New England Telephone. Beating the Belles is the conflict of the story and the mission of the Spurs, a patchwork team of housewives and nurses and nieces joined by powerful motives.” Los Angeles Times

    “The story is focused on Gussie Cabrini, an ex-professional athlete who returns to Currys Crossing, Mass., and struggles to rebuild her life after a devastating accident. Against all odds, she transforms a motley crew of nonathletes into the Spurs, the town’s first women’s softball team, which ultimately alters the lives of the players as well as their families...The dialogue has a believable ring and Ms. Cooney has a nice feel for the psychology of women.” New York Times Book Review

    “Add All the Way Home (which is even better than Cooney’s winning first novel, Small-Town Girl) to the lineup of superb fiction about sports. Or make that just superb fiction. What will knock you out the most, with their amazing grace and gusto, are the passages about softball itself. Not since I last read Updike on Ted Williams have I encountered a crack-of-the-bat home run as deliriously satisfying.” Boston Magazine

    “Ingeniously plotted...All the Way Home is an exciting, down-to-the-wire softball saga, as well as a lively tale of self-empowerment. Ellen Cooney is playing on her keen sense of the funny and the poignant and the true. And she’s playing to win.” Ms.

    “All the Way Home is a stunning novel about a group of women who save themselves by organizing a softball team. Because they band together, they discover their lives can change...It’s a fine story about women who endure and triumph because they care about each other, but it’s also a story about a game: a tough, tense game that keeps the reader involved until the last hit in the final inning.” Worcester MA Telegram & Gazette

    “The impending confrontation between the Spurs and the Belles is a running metaphor for larger issues--much larger. The subject of this grand slam of a book is not the game alone...What’s remarkable about these particular women is why they’re asserting themselves to such an extent. You’ll feel a deep rapport with them.” Mademoiselle

    “All the Way Home describes a group of older women, housewives and mothers, who play softball as a way of protecting each other from demons, real and imagined, that have haunted them for years...One of the beautiful aspects of this book is how the Spurs seem to be organized to protect everyone.” San Francisco Chronicle

    “If Hollywood is interested in getting some real and contemporary women onto the screen, it should look into Ellen Cooney’s delightful novel about a women’s softball team in a small New England town.” New York Daily News

    “A vivid portrayal of intertwining lives that shape each other from pain and sorrow to discovery and momentous change. Ellen Cooney has written an honest, compelling novel of lives and relationships in small-town America. Subtle, powerful, and totally entertaining, All the Way Home is a narrative triumph.” From the jacket