The author of Shoeless Joe (1982), upon which the film Field of Dreams was based, returns with his third novel about baseball. Kinsella sets his story in 1940's Alberta, the Canadian prairie province that closely resembles the Upper Midwest in both its passion for baseball and, at least according to Kinsella, its earthy and colorful citizens. One Truckbox Al McClintock, a mechanic perpetually covered in grease, excites the locals with his ability to hit a baseball out of the park and across the river behind it. People think he might make it in the majors, but how would that be possible for an obscure Canadian? Well, there's a war on, and Edmonton has become a stop-off point for American troops building the Alaska Highway. To keep the troops happy, exhibition baseball is brought in, featuring none other than the great Bob Feller, and through contrived events Truckbox bats against him. There's not much of a story otherwise, unless it's of young Jamie O'Day's coming-of-age; he's the ``hillbilly'' narrator named after James Oliver Curwood. The account of box socials, where young men bid for lunches packed by the mothers of eligible young women, is amusing and recalls the period sweetly. So too do the Ukrainian wedding and the great, farcical game the novel moves toward. And yet the myth Kinsella trades on—that out of a Midwest full of rubes will come a great baseball player—is undercut by his desire at all costs to please, to turn everything into a joke. A kind of condescension to the material results, and McClintock or his sexy sweetheart Louisa May become caricatures. Jokes about the Minnesota weather (``nine months of winter followed by poor sledding'') are getting awfully stale, and Kinsella's stylistic trick of repeating funny adjectives (``genuine'' Cardinals or ``more-or-less-Doreen Beach Sigurdson'') seems forced. Nostalgia and lust are the appeals here, as if Garrison Keillor had gone randy. Bound to be popular—but Kinsella's formula grows thin.
Pub Date: May 30, 1992
ISBN: 0-345-37749-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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