From Publishers Weekly
Dense with meaning, engagingly readable and with a universal truth at their core, these stories have the impact of well-wrought poetry. As in his novel Shoeless Joe , in which a long-deceased baseball player sets up a game in a startled fan's backyard, Kinsella's title piece explores the shifting borders of reality as Flannery O'Connor's character Enoch Emery comes to life and moves in with his creator. The stories' themes and characters are often fanciful, sometimes verging on the bizarre--the survivor of a freakish crime, as in "Oh, Marley," or a man who runs off with his daughter's teenage friend in "Evangeline's Mother"--but in Kinsella's hands they become poignantly credible. Profiling a wife's long-buried resentments as reflected in her "Driving Patterns," the author expertly sets a menacing mood. Narrated by the gunfighter's mild-mannered friend, "Billy in Trinidad" shows a sympathetic side of Billy the Kid. A disaffected baseball player finds true love in "Butterfly Winter," a tale that evokes the magical realism of South American fiction, while a yuppie ruefully recalls his carefree '60s days and his hippie girlfriend in the endpiece, "Mother Tucker's Yellow Duck."
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
From Library Journal
As he did in Shoeless Joe ( LJ 4/1/82), which became the popular film Field of Dreams , Kinsella presents characters who frequently blur the distinction between literal truth and personal mythology. Most of the 13 short stories begin as an outsider enters the situation, the author's homage to his grandmother's tales, always introduced with the words, "then, knocks at the door a stranger. . . ." In the title story, a character from Flannery O'Connor's fiction comes to live with his creator. "Elvis Bound" portrays a woman whose belief that the King might be her father haunts her marriage and family life. "Billy in Trinidad" shows Billy the Kid wearing his guns on the baseball field and performing good deeds; "Mother Tucker's Yellow Duck" pays tribute to a "Sixties kid" still creating her own past and present. Recommended for its varied and intriguing slices of life.
- Debbie Tucker, Cincinnati Technical Coll., OhioCopyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
