This page lists the known reviews of Cleo Birdwell/Don DeLillo's 1980 novel (written with help from Sue Buck), Amazons.
In recent years here have been a number of articles "re-discovering" Amazons:
Amazons came into the world more in the style of a put-on than a hoax. DeLillo wrote the book in collaboration with Sue Buck, a friend and colleague from his Ogilvy & Mather days and a dedicatee of White Noise. She apparently provided such hockey expertise as was needed and the raw material concerning Cleo's idyllic Ohio childhood. DeLillo's editor at Knopf, his publisher at the time, was insufficiently amused, and so the two were allowed to sell the book elsewhere on the condition that DeLillo's authorship be hidden. Holt, Rinehart, and Winston picked Amazons up and proceeded to publish it with deadpan skill, slyly eliding the question of its factual nature.
But Birdwell is not a professional author; her narrative follows no game plan. She experiences it as we do, moment by moment, and is sometimes equally surprised at the turns of events. Naturally, since she is a woman and full of small-town sociability, she writes mostly not about hockey action, in which every player is alone, or even about her happy youth. She tells about the people she lives among. And in the world of professional sport they ale almost all men.
But even if it doesn't sound funny, it is. Cleo Birdwell has a way with the incongruous, which doesn't come as a surprise once you've learned that her name is the nom de plume for Don DeLillo, the novelist. She has this talent for grabbing clichés by the throat and strangling them until they cough up meaning. She turns meaning inside out and exposes its nonsense.