A baseball team of orphaned children inside a Syrian refugee camp is the improbable engine of the novel Gregory Orfalea will discuss in Pasadena on Tuesday.
The book is called Wonder and Shame, and its premise is as unlikely as it sounds. A lapsed Catholic named Frank Matter boards a one-way flight to Syria in the spring of 2016, hoping to reach his family’s ancestral village outside Damascus and carry his deaf cousin Dayzi home to America. The war stops them. They land instead in a refugee camp holding half a million people, and Frank decides to teach the deeply traumatized orphans there how to play baseball.
Orfalea will discuss and sign the novel at 7:00 p.m. Tuesday, August 4, at Vroman’s Bookstore, 695 East Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena. Vroman’s has published no ticket requirement, reservation or admission price for the appearance. Three of the store’s other events between August 4 and August 18 require tickets, and three require an RSVP.
The novel arrived on June 15 from Word on Fire Luminor. It runs 448 pages and sells at Vroman’s for $29.95. The store had 28 copies in stock as of Monday evening.
Orfalea was born and raised in Los Angeles. He is the author or editor of eleven books, according to his publisher. Among them are Journey to the Sun, a biography of Junípero Serra published by Scribner, and The Man Who Guarded the Bomb, a collection of short fiction. His memoir collection Angeleno Days won the Arab American Book Award and was a finalist for the PEN USA Prize for Creative Nonfiction. He has taught at the Claremont Colleges, Georgetown University and Westmont College, and lives in Santa Barbara.
Chaucer’s Books in Santa Barbara hosted Orfalea on June 3. In its announcement, the store described Frank as a historian disillusioned with his country during the 2016 presidential campaign who learns his family’s ancestral village has been destroyed in a chemical weapons attack. Dayzi, in that account, is known as the Seamstress of Damascus.
The novel takes Orfalea’s work into “welcome new territory,” Michael Murphy, director of the Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage, wrote in an endorsement on the book’s jacket.
Vroman’s was founded in Pasadena in 1894 by Adam Clark Vroman, who left the store to longtime employees when he died in 1916. The bookstore says it hosts more than 400 free community events a year.
The store is open until 9:00 p.m. Tuesday. On-street meters in Playhouse Village run until 8:00 p.m. Monday through Saturday and cost $1.25 an hour on lower-demand blocks and $2.00 an hour in the core area, with escalating rates past two hours. Garages and surface lots operate nearby. Call (626) 449-5320 or see vromansbookstore.com/event/2026-08-04/gregory-orfalea.
Frank Matter’s question, the one the book opens on, is whether a person can throw himself away. He asks it as he boards, before he knows about the camp, or the orphans, or the game he will try to teach them.
