Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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5.0 out of 5 stars
excellent book, holds baseball and frankenstein, 29 Nov 1998
By A Customer
This is a great book. The realistic and enjoyable baseball exploits are combined with a plot twist that is literally out of left field. The science fiction element may be in a strange setting, but that only adds to the perfect description of time and place.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Field of Nightmares?, 4 April 1998
By A Customer
Set in the same period of baseball as "A league of their own," this is a novel which evokes the same sort of nostalgia for a time when the game was about hope and camaraderie and when the money was just a tad better than a living wage. As a chronicle of a small-time local league team in Georgia, it will more than hold your interest. Michael Bishop draws the entire team, the owner, his wife and their niece as a complex set of interacting characters, described in the first person by the promising new short-stop from Oklahoma. As a baseball novel, this book cannot be faulted for its simple love of the game. On the other hand, the central plot twist has nothing whatsoever to do with baseball. Who is the monstrous Jumbo Clerval, huge and weird first baseman who doesn't say much but, when he does, talks in a foreign, nineteenth-century sort of way? Why is he so bent on self-improvement? Can the terminally shy narrator, his room-mate, trust him? Even when you begin to figure out the answers to these questions, the plot just keeps drawing you in. If you love baseball, you need to read this book. (With a name like Doubleday, I didn't have much choice.) If you love well-written science fiction, you need to read this book. (With a name like Doubleday, I get blamed for a lot of really rotten science fiction.) If you're an old softie who likes a story with a cast of hundreds, a gawky romance, a little dash of Southern sensibility and a sad but redeeming tale of life as a 6'8" chap at the North Pole (I hope this doesn't give the plot away), you definitely need to read this book. (This has nothing to do with me being a Doubleday apart from the height, but hey, I need a third point for the tricolon.) End of tricolon. If you read this book, and I beg you to do so, please let me know what you thought of it. I'd hate to think that the best novel I've read this year doesn't appeal to anyone else.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Wonderful and unexpected, 9 Mar 1998
By A Customer
I'm not a fan of baseball, but after reading this novel I can understand the romantic, mythic nature of the sport a little better. You might want to read Frankenstein before you read this novel to get the in-jokes. It's a very satisfying novel--blends genres of mystery, sports, romance, and the more meditative personal history. I loved it.
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