Once Around the Track » (Reprint)

Sharyn McCrumb is the author of The Rosewood Casket, She Walks These Hills and many other acclaimed novels. Her books have been named Notable Books of the Year by the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. She was named a “Virginia Woman of History” for Achievement in Literature in 2008. She lives and writes in the Virginia Blue Ridge, less than a hundred miles from where her family settled in 1790 in the Smoky Mountains that divide North Carolina and Tennessee.

Racing fans have never seen anything like it-and they've seen plenty-the first all-women's team in stock-car racing history. Already a national sensation, the spotlight heats up when financial challenges force Team 86 to hire a male "wheel man."

And Badger Jenkins is a man all right-a sweet-faced Georgian who oozes aw-shucks charm off the track and unleashes blistering speed in competition. But the real Badger is a hard man to know. Just ask the women whose job it is to keep both car and driver in one piece.

From crew chief and team manager Tuggle to engine specialist Rosalind Manning, publicist Melanie Sark and diehard fan Taran Stiles, this asphalt sisterhood will power through a racing season of dizzying highs and terrifying lows to prove that women can do a man's job. And when the unthinkable happens, each will realize that they've been hurtling at breakneck speed toward a moment that will change them forever.

Publishers Weekly

Bestseller McCrumb (St. Dale; Ghost Riders) returns to the world of NASCAR in this middling tale of modern celebrity. Badger Jenkins, a shy, good old boy from Marengo, Ga., whose days of racing stardom have come and gone, is recruited by a syndicate of women investors to drive their new car. The car's primary sponsor is Vagenya (sounds like Virginia), a Viagra-like product for women, and the team will field an all-female crew. Besides the inscrutable but lovable Badger, there's Grace Tuggle, the gruff crew chief; Melodie Albigre, Jenkins's predatory agent; and Melanie Sark, a duplicitous publicist who's secretly planning to write an exposé of NASCAR. Add the competing agendas to an inexperienced pit crew, and Team Vagenya seems to be headed for a pileup long before it gets to victory lane. NASCAR fans will enjoy the time spent at the track, but the pedestrian plotting and unsurprising outcome hinder the novel like sugar in a gas tank. (June)