Monday, November 14, 2016

Blowback '07 - Spotlight



THE ROAD TO THE FUTURE WINDS THROUGH THE PAST IN BLOWBACK ‘07




Modern football owes a giant debt to a tiny school: The Carlisle Indian School of Carlisle, PA. In the very early 1900s, the Carlisle Indians led the way in saving the brutal and deadly game of football from being abolished. Award-winning and three-time Emmy winner, Brian Meehl, tells this story in a genre-bending novel of time travel and historical fiction.

In Meehl’s riveting new book, BLOWBACK ’07, readers are transported back to 1907 where legendary coach Pop Warner, future Olympian Jim Thorpe, and the Carlisle “Redmen” transform how the game is played. Their Goliath-slaying introduction of the passing game, and the “single wing” (today’s “wildcat), become the pillars of high school, college, and pro football we know today.

But BLOWBACK ’07 ranges far wider than football.

The story begins with contemporary and clashing twins, Iris and Arky, who have one thing in common: an ancient musical instrument left to them by their mother, who mysteriously disappeared a year earlier. When Iris plays the strangely curved woodwind, the trouble begins: their high school’s star quarterback disappears.

Transported to 1907 and the Carlisle Indian School, Matt is forced to play under Coach Pop Warner as the Carlisle Indians revolutionize Ivy League football. Matt’s struggle to “play his way home” is complicated when he falls in love with an Indian girl. Meanwhile, Iris and Arky discover a cache of secrets that might help bring back Matt, as well as their long-lost mother trapped in the past.

BLOWBACK ’07 launches a century-spanning trilogy to be continued in Blowback ’63 and Blowback ’94. Books two and three propel the characters to another illuminating past, and transform them in ways they never imagined.

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Brian Meehl has published four novels with Random House: Out of Patience, Suck It Up, Suck It Up and Die, and You Don’t Know About Me. His books have garnered a Junior Library Guild Selection, a Blue Ribbon from the Bulletin for the Center for Children’s Books and starred reviews in Publishers Weekly. In a former incarnation, Meehl was a puppeteer on “Sesame Street” and in Jim Henson films, including “The Dark Crystal.” His transition from puppets to pen included writing for television shows such as “The Magic School Bus” and “Between the Lions.” for which he won three Emmys. Meehl lives in Connecticut and is writing Blowback ’63 and Blowback ’94. For more information about this author and his exciting books, please visit www.brianmeehl.com and/or www.blowbacktrilogy.com.