Home or Away

By: Kathleen West

Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell

Length: 11 hrs and 34 mins

Publisher's summary

"A gloriously entertaining plunge into the ultra-competitive world of youth sports and the lengths we go to for the kids and game we love." (New York Times best-selling author KJ Dell'Antonia)

Two friends, one Olympic dream, and the choice that stood in the way.

Once Leigh and Susy were close friends and teammates bound for Olympic hockey gold, but when Leigh’s sure-fire plan to make the final roster backfired, she left everything behind to start over, including the one person who knew her secret.

Two decades later, Leigh’s a successful investment banker, happily married, and the mom of a hockey prodigy, so when a career opportunity lands the family back in Minnesota, Leigh takes the shot for her kid. Back in the ultra-competitive world she left behind, the move puts her in Susy’s orbit, a daily reminder of how Leigh watched from the sidelines as her former teammate went on to Olympic glory.

Despite the coldness between them, Susy can’t help but hope that Leigh might lace up her skates and join her in the coaches’ box - after all Leigh knows better than anyone how hard it is to be a woman in this world. Susy knows soon her daughter, Georgie, will be seen as a “girl athlete,” relegated to the B team, with less support and opportunity to advance.

But Leigh believes keeping Susy at arms’ length is the only way to hide her history with her former coach Jeff Carlson. When he hints of new favors in exchange for her son’s ice time, Leigh is caught in the ultimate bind: Come clean about what happened when she was an Olympic hopeful and risk her marriage or play Jeff’s game. In a moment of desperation, Leigh realizes the one person she thought was her biggest competitor - her former teammate - might turn out to be her biggest ally.

Told with Kathleen West’s trademark wit and compassion, Home or Away is a story about overcoming our pasts, confronting our futures, and the sustaining bonds of female friendship.

©2022 Kathleen West (P)2022 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

"A gloriously entertaining plunge into the ultra-competitive world of youth sports and the lengths we go to for the kids and game we love."—New York Times bestselling author KJ Dell'Antonia

“How much raw emotion can one writer put into a story? Kathleen West shows us in her luminous new novel Home or Away, set in the competitive world of youth hockey in Minnesota, known as the State of Hockey.”—St. Paul Pioneer Press

“West captures the kid hockey scene with blade-sharp precision."—Star Tribune

A good story

Leigh returns to her home town twenty years after she failed to make the Olympic US Hockey team. Her former best friend Susy, who did make the team still lives in Minnesota, coaching her own daughter’s hockey team. Also still in town, their former coach with whom Leigh had an affair who now stands accused of sexual impropriety.

I was initially disappointed HOME OR AWAY didn’t have the ‘privileged people behaving badly’ of Kathleen West’s previous book, but I quickly became enveloped in Leigh’s journey. Trying to be a good hockey mom, she feels forced into another quagmire with her former coach.

I took a while to warm up to Leigh and have empathy for her when coming clean about decisions she was coerced into making before she was engaged would have solved not just her problems, those of other’s as well. At times she’s cruel to her husband, loose with words that should never be spoken.

Is there a point where doing the right thing has taken too long? I think so, but it’s still better than never doing what’s right.