Matt Kilburn knows everything about baseball. He is grooming his friend Sanji Salaam to be a pitcher for the big leagues. But when he and his mother move to a farm outside of town, Matt has to leave his dreams of Bantam League and his friends behind. While Matt is exploring the barn in his new home, a knock on the head triggers a series of events that leads to a meeting with a ghost that changes his life and the future of baseball!
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From School Library Journal
Grade 5-9-Set in Canada, this novel involves extended dream sequences, ghostly appearances, an unusual invention, and fortuitous discoveries. At the beginning, baseball fan and player Matt Killburn moves from his home in town to a place in the country. He doesn't like the change, and he's also worried about his Uncle Costa, whose small store may be forced out of business. While exploring a barn, Matt discovers a strange machine and is knocked out cold when he turns it on. The middle part of the book involves a long dream sequence, set many years earlier, when a young man named Jimmy Fox meets an eccentric inventor named Butts Wagner, the brother of Honus Wagner. He has designed a baseball-bat machine that will revolutionize the game. Jimmy helps him ward off some organized-crime figures and they soon start production. Unfortunately, just as things get going, Butts dies from a heart attack. The scene then shifts back to the present day, with Matt being visited by his ghost and eventually discovering a Honus Wagner baseball card that will supply enough money to reactivate the Wagner Whacker baseball-bat machine and give Uncle Costa employment running the factory. This is an amazingly complicated story. It's like Field of Dreams put in a blender. Unfortunately, all of the elements of the plot may leave young readers scratching their heads: it's done in by a few too many supernatural events.
Todd Morning, Schaumburg Township Public Library,
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Todd Morning, Schaumburg Township Public Library,
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Gr. 7^-12. As in W. P. Kinsella's 1982 adult book Shoeless Joe (the inspiration for the movie Field of Dreams), unfulfilled baseball dreams bring ghosts to farmlands ripe for a new diamond. Young Matt is heartsick about moving to the small Canadian town of Fergis, where baseball has lost its luster. A severe blow to the head from a rusted machine sends Matt into a 1928 dream in which Butts Wagner is about to revolutionize baseball with his new bat-making invention. Wagner's sudden death thwarts the project until Matt comes to and realizes some ghosts from his dream have returned to fulfill their destinies. Although spirits and time travel are pivotal elements for advancing the plot, the main story is firmly grounded by solid characters and plausible events. Although downplaying the fantasy might diminish the magic for some readers, most will relish the engaging tale, which surprises with new revelations to the very end. Nancy Willard's adult novel Things Invisible to See (1984) is another baseball fantasy. Roger Leslie
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