Rating: 
Summary: A Called Strike
Review: W.P. Kinsella may well be the greatest writer of baseball fiction in America. Except for a few lines at the first and the last of the book, this isn't about baseball. W.P. Kinsella is a fine novelist. This book is not really a novel. It is a short story which has been padded until it is novel length. The New York times likens it to the "humerous voice of Garrison Keillor." That may well be the cruk of its problem. Kinsella uses a Keilloresque trick of giving long, descriptive names to people and then repeating them each time he encounters them in his monologue. This works for Garrison Keillor; it does not work for Kinsella. Instead of making the book funny, it makes the book hard to read. In the end, I did what no one should have to do with a favorite author; I finished the book from a sense of duty
Rating: 
Summary: Readers Beware: Baseball Bypassed
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: Base hit or line drive?
Review: When one picks up a book by W.P. Kinsella one may have a pre-conceived idea of what they are getting into. When that conception is not met exactly, then there is usually a sense of disappointment. I did not come to BOX SOCIALS from knowing of his Baseball stories, but rather from knowing of his First Nations (he is Cree?) stories - first the short stories and then his "padded" ones that became noveletts.
BOX SOCIALS tries to stride across both cultures. Though I found the voice of the storyteller and the method of the narration delightful and even somewhat intreaguing just to see if the author could maintain it throughout the book, I could see where it might get in the way for some readers.
BOX SOCIALS is not a bout baseball, nor about First Nations citizens, but about growing up in a back-water region that is not unlike what we find in some of our own Southern writers venue. He has populated it with some very intersting characters - all sharpely and clearly drawn. He has painted a picture of the area that is both uplifting and depressing (after all, it is the end of the Great Depression). But above all, he tells a story that is well worth listening to.
Rating:
Summary: I don't want to be rude but...
Review: Without the example of T. R. Pearson's A BRIEF HISTORY OF A SMALL PLACE Kinsella would have had no precedent for the repetitive style he uses in BOX SOCIALS, a novel set in the time and place of his own childhood, west of Edmonton near a place called Darwell in the 1930s--when you were supposed to have a license from the government to turn your radio on!That he succeeds in telling a baseball tale in a time when he himself knew no baseball and weaves in some truths about the racism that existed in what was, even there, a multi-cultural environment is a tribute to his inventiveness. This book is best read aloud with a Southern accent. So, if you aren't prepared to "work" at it a bit, you'll probably be disappointed. Otherwise, you'll find yourself noticing the width of the Pembina River-- next time you're on the Edmonton/Jasper highway.
Rating: 
Summary: Know T. R. Pearson's Examples or Miss Kinsella's Model Here!
Review: Without the example of T. R. Pearson's A BRIEF HISTORY OF A SMALL PLACE Kinsella would have had no precedent for the repetitive style he uses in BOX SOCIALS, a novel set in the time and place of his own childhood, west of Edmonton near a place called Darwell in the 1930s--when you were supposed to have a license from the government to turn your radio on! That he succeeds in telling a baseball tale in a time when he himself knew no baseball and weaves in some truths about the racism that existed in what was, even there, a multi-cultural environment is a tribute to his inventiveness. This book is best read aloud with a Southern accent. So, if you aren't prepared to "work" at it a bit, you'll probably be disappointed. Otherwise, you'll find yourself noticing the width of the Pembina River-- next time you're on the Edmonton/Jasper highway.
Rating:
Summary: Box Socials mediocre, plotless
Review: WP Kinsella's book "Box Socials" is an excellent insight into the white trash of Alberta. It displays a community kind of like Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird," with many well-defined social classes in an area where you're judged by your name. However, the book loses a plot during a Ukranian wedding, and it drudges on to the end.
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