About a baseball game only two men remember anything about (including the stats, scores and players), but which was never recorded in written history... Great story. ( )

An engaging, beautiful story with well-realized characters and incredible writing. I think that Kinsella sometimes hits the magical-realism-button a bit too hard, but this is otherwise one of the better books I've read this summer. Kinsella gets baseball on a level I didn't even know existed (which I really should have expected, but hey). Give it a whirl. ( )

Has a mystical feel. Sort of a science fiction/baseball book. Very enjoyable. ( )

What a fun book! Also a bit confusing, however. I really loved all of the baseball + time travel + historical figures (Teddy Roosevelt, Leonardo da Vinci). But some of the other characters, such as Sunny, bothered me, and I didn't get the thing about Sarah getting stuck. The ending kind of lost me. Still, left me feeling pretty happy with it. ( )

I received this book ages ago as a gift, but I hadn't gotten around to reading it until now, which is somewhat surprising since it's baseball and fiction (a dynamite combination for me). I think part of my hesitancy was that it was by the same author who wrote the book Shoeless Joe, upon which Field of Dreams is based. I may be alone in this among baseball fans, but I never cared much for Field of Dreams because to me it was just too much of a head trip. But I have to admit now, having read The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, that it is possible that I just did not enjoy Field of Dreams because of the medium and that perhaps Kinsella's books are not meant to be filmed, because this was a pleasure to read although thoroughly more strange than Field of Dreams ever was.

Where to start: this book involves Leonardo Da Vinci, an irritable little person, an Indian who has been waiting centuries for the return of his wife, time travel, a flood of epic proportions, a church that does everything 12 hours earlier/later than the rest of the world does, an angel statue playing as a right fielder, and the complete disappearance of an entire baseball league. Oh, and a baseball game that lasts in excess of 2000 innings. Yeah, like I said, definitely strange. But odd as it might be, the book's message that the pursuit of obsession may be a fruitless one and the road we think we want to travel may in fact be quite different than we imagined comes shining through despite the odd series of events. I think what I enjoyed most was the humor of it and that at no point did the strangeness feel out of place. There isn't much character development here really, which is usually something I insist on, but the plot here is so rich that I will excuse it.

All in all, a wonderful story about myth-making and baseball. My only complaint resides with the ending, which is not clear at all unfortunately. A tip of my cap to Kinsella, as this novel could have completely flown off the handle into "completely ridiculous" territory, and at times very nearly did, but he managed to control it. ( )