Box Socials
by W.P. Kinsella
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Book Summary Information
Author: W.P. KinsellaEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 1993-03-02
ISBN: 0345382536
Number of pages: 240
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Book Reviews of Box Socials
Book Review: Readers Beware: Baseball Bypassed
Summary: 2 Stars
W.P. Kinsella mixes baseball with small town nostalgia too bake a cake not fit to eat in Box Socials. Kinsella's lure of a promising baseball star, Truckbox Al McClintock, leads readers into believing they are reading a book about baseball, when in fact the sport takes a back seat to the stories and events of everyday people in the Six Towns, a small area in Alberta not even on the map. No one of any significance has ever been produced from the Six Towns and when Truckbox Al hits five homeruns into the Pembina River, one clear across, the town members grow excited that he may bring them fame. In the meantime (about four-fifths of the book), narrator Jamie O'Day takes us on a journey to visit this small town area during World War II, sharing its occurrences along the way.Box Socials intends to pull the reader in to the nostalgia of small town life in 1940s Alberta with a lack of phones, a one-room schoolhouse, and box socials where box lunches are auctioned off so a boy can share lunch with a girl. However, the routine and regularity of the town soon become redundant and hackneyed. The Bjornsen Brothers play the same music and the widow Beatrice Ann Stevenson repeats the same Emily Dickinson poems at every social affair. Not only does Kinsella repeat in his recounts of the stories, but in his descriptions of the people or events. Every time the baseball game is mentioned, Kinsella finds it necessary to state the Major League team consists of Bob Feller, Hal Newhouser, and Joe DiMaggio himself, a detail that becomes all too annoying.
Truckbox Al's strikeout in the big game reverts the area back to where it started, just the town and its people, no one more famous than anyone else. Box socials are a very appropriate event in the Six Towns because a box lunch is exactly what they are. The box of the area encloses all its people and they share only with each other what is in their box, their hearts, their minds. Although a nice idea, the nostalgia in Box Socials transforms a book about baseball into a book about small town life. Do not be misled,baseball fans, this one is for those desiring to relive the past.
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