The bulk of the stories in this collection feature a boy named Sugar Mecklin of Arrow Catcher, Mississippi. Sugar’s father is an alcoholic house painter with unrealized dreams of success in show business and no particular skill or talent. His mother supports Sugar’s father with love and admiration, so much that she was “ugly with love.”

Sugar fishes for chickens in his yard, until he actually catches a rooster and ends up wearing it on his head. He also shoots at his father through a window, missing twice, maybe on purpose. He feels sick and awful for months, until Big B.G., a useless boy’s dad, tells him “no man is going to get mad at his boy for taking a shot at him, Sugar.” Sugar is surrounded by love, dysfunction, and dysfunctional love.

In the non-Sugar stories a city couple unsuited for farming buy a farm and have issues with wild dogs – and create a terrible situation. A self-conscious young woman saves a physically perfect man frown drowning after a lamprey eel attaches itself to him, on their first (and most likely only) date. A high school boy’s eyes are opened to a wider world when he spends a summer as an attendant to a paralyzed man.

Lewis Nordan was a master of the humorous, quirky but deadly serious southern novel, and here, short story. ( )

At first I didn't know what to make of the collection of short stories within The All-Girl Football Team. Most of the stories take place in Arrow Catcher, Mississippi and Sugar Mecklin is almost always the central character. Sugar is a typical young boy looking for ways to grow up fast in a stranger than strange household. Mama is obsessed with drama and tinged with mental illness and Daddy is an alcoholic with a thing for rock 'n roll. All of the stories are laced with an off-kilter humor that alternately made me want to laugh and cry. The very first short story called, "Sugar Among the Chickens" tells the tale of eleven year old Sugar literally fishing (with a pole, hook and all) for the chickens in the front yard. Since his parents won't let him go to the local watering hole chickens are his substitute for fish and fresh kernels of corn serve as bait...However, the third story, "Sugar, the Eunuchs and Big G.B" wasn't nearly as funny as it was dark. In it Sugar tries to shoot his father. You'll begin to notice Nordan has a things for guns, especially loaded ones. Probably the hardest story to read was "Wild Dog." If you have a thing for animals read it with one eye shut tight. ( )

Often, to me, Nordan feels like a guilty pleasure, like the Phantom Tollbooth or something pitched far below an adult reading level. But then . . . his timing is too flawless, his characters too lovingly and believably drawn, his dialect too memorable and his bizarreness too unexpected for me to give him the gold star of "good subway reading" and move on. He might actually be a good writer.

"John Thomas Bird" and "The All-Girl Football Team" are the obvious success stories of the collection and "The Farmers' Daughter" is the fumble. I can't tell (yet) what portion of the enjoyment I get from this man's stories comes from the fact that I have now read four novels worth of his effort to create one, stable, well-populated fictional counterpart to Yawknapawtapha county. Nordan focuses exclusively on the marginal, uneducated, strange, dysfunctional, innocent and lovable sort of folks that American novels are so agonizingly filled with. But he does it better than any other American author that I have read. He does it without constant self-conscious and self-congratulatory cultural and literary references and without deploying any wry, triumphant, hyper-aware characters; he is also not burdened with an agenda (at least his agenda doesn't seem to go beyond hoping that his readers will become less condemning of gender confused young men).

If you don't like the two stories I singled out above, don't bother reading anything else by Nordan. If you do enjoy them, he has filled hundreds and hundreds of pages with material you might have trouble defending your taste for. ( )