Review by Booklist Review
Still dreaming of a major-league baseball career, Mike Houle signs on with Grand Mound, Iowa, of the semipro Cornbelt League. He lives with the Powell family and in the mornings works in Emmett Powell's insurance office; in the evenings, he sits on the porch with Emmett's daughter. The rhythms of small-town life are seductive, but something is wrong: the team only plays intrasquad games; somehow the real games keep being rescheduled. Numerous former players--recruited as Mike was--have married local girls and stayed on in Grand Mound. Gradually, it become clear to Mike that he was enticed to Grand Mound for reasons that have nothing to do with baseball. Kinsella, author of Shoeless Joe (1982), which was made into the movie Field of Dreams, once again paints a very attractive if idealized portrait of pastoral small-town life. It's as though Rod Serling borrowed Frank Capra's plot to create a Twilight Zone episode called "It Could Be A Wonderful Life." A sentimental but clear-eyed parable about how we make the choices in our lives. --Wes Lukowsky
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Previously published in Canada and optioned for film by the producer of The Natural, this is a warmhearted, homespun novel by the award-winning author of 30 books including Shoeless Joe, which was made into the Academy Award-nominated Kevin Costner movie Field of Dreams. When LSU's phenomenal second baseman Mike Houle turns down a signing bonus from the Montreal Expos in order to complete his senior year and graduate, his performance on the field declines, and he is passed over in the next draft. Desperate for another chance, he accepts his agent's offer to sharpen his skills, playing the next season for Grand Mound, Iowa, in the conspicuously anonymous semipro Cornbelt League. While the semipro circuit pays a modest salary plus room and board with a local sponsor, it also requires the players to work at regular day jobs, usually provided by the local businessmen sponsors. Mike soon discovers that the town is populated by former players who married local girls and stayed on to raise families, and it just so happens that his sponsor has a beautiful daughter. During the preseason, Mike falls for the girl, and the plot thickens when his widower dad comes to see him play and is invited to stay at the home of a comely widow. Is this paradise, or is it an all-too-comfortable prison? Feeling betrayed, Mike takes another offer, but soon finds that the grass is not always greener. This soft lob of a novel doesn't fly quite as high as the author's previous home-run hits, but satisfies with its endearing characters and baseball lore. (Nov.) Forecast: Kinsella's fans should respond well to this title, and if the promise of a film version is realized, look for even bigger sales later on. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Canadian native Kinsella's first novel to be published in the US since Box Socials (1992) is another saga of baseball in Iowa. Ever since the success of Field of Dreams, the film based on his novel Shoeless Joe, Kinsella has been plowing the same furrow of corn-fed, baseball-driven magical realism. This new effort comes after a long layoff resulting from a serious accident that cost him four years of hospitalization and rehabilitation. Regrettably, like a player coming off the disabled list, Kinsella seems rusty, his timing more than a little off in this story of Mike Houle, a star college second-baseman at the end of a lousy senior year who is offered one last chance at a baseball career by his agent. His last-ditch effort will put him in the semi-pro Iowa Cornbelt League in the idyllic town of Grand Mound. But it quickly becomes obvious to Mike, who narrates, that Grand Mound is, if anything, too idyllic. The family he stays with treats him like a son, welcomes his widower father with glee, and hooks him up with a pretty widow. Everyone seems too good to be true, and the team never gets beyond playing inter-squad games that attract the entire population of the town. Of course, there's a deep secret, but, as usual in Kinsella's feel-good fairy tales, the secret is as much in Mike's heart as in the town itself. Kinsella has been guilty of overwriting, but the purple patches in Shoeless Joe were amply compensated by a certain craftiness in the book's overall architecture. The prose in this outing, regrettably, is flat and affectless, devoid of texture or sense of place or era, while the interweaving of plot strands is mechanical. The result is a treacly valentine to small-town life in something akin to the Norman Rockwell mode.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
