SOURCE: Review of Magic Time, by W. P. Kinsella. Kirkus Reviews 69, no. 19 (1 October 2001): 1385-386.

In the following review, the critic faults Magic Time for being overly sentimental, contrived, and a rehashing of similar themes and plots from Kinsella's previous novels.

Canadian native Kinsella's first novel to be published in the US since Box Socials (1992), [Magic Time,] is another saga of baseball in Iowa.

Ever since the success of Field of Dreams, the film based on his novel Shoeless Joe, Kinsella has been plowing the same furrow of corn-fed, baseball-driven magical realism. This new effort comes after a long layoff resulting from a serious accident that cost him four years of hospitalization and rehabilitation. Regrettably, like a player coming off the disabled list, Kinsella seems rusty, his timing more than a little off in this story of Mike Houle, a star college second-baseman at the end of a lousy...