Garner and her grandson Amby are deep in the throes of a shared obsession with Australian football—or “footy”—as Amby advances into his local club’s Under-16s. In this book, Garner documents the camaraderie and the competition on the field: the bracing nights of training, the endurance of pain, the growth of a gaggle of laughing boys into a formidable, focused team.
Beautiful ... Inclusive and universal, curious and tender, perceptive and wise ... The Season is joyful, but there is a carefully woven thread of melancholy running through it, and it is this that gives the book its lovely, old-gold sunset hue ... Enchanting, perceptive.
[Garner] is working in epic mode in The Season ... Garner is not alone in making extravagant claims about the grandeur of football but it is her language that ennobles the game and the players. Garner has always been an extraordinary stylist and in The Season her prose, athletic, soars and dances, just like those young footballers. How does she do it, you wonder, as she transforms yet another grey training drill into a lesson on endurance and camaraderie ... As ever, the simplicity and precision of her diction anchors her supple syntax.
Meditative and moving ... As an invisible witness, she takes an almost anthropological approach to understanding her youngest grandchild and his peers, boys on the cusp of manhood ... The author tends to romanticize the game, even at its most brutal.
