Box Socials

Rating:
Summary: A Fun Book for Baseball Fans
Review: I am a big fan of all of Kinsella's baseball books. This one takes us to 1940's Canada as seen throught the eyes of young Jamie O'Day. We hear about all the eccentric people in Jamie's life including Truckbox Al McClintock, the Little American Soldier, and many other interesting characters of the region. It is always appealing to me how the author revolves his story around baseball. Bob Feller even has a role in the story. My only complaint would be that the way the author repeats names of people and towns throughout the book can be annoying. Box Socials takes us to a time when life was slower and people enjoyed following the small town baseball teams. If you are a baseball fan and enjoy a good story-I think you will have fun reading Box Socials.

Rating:
Summary: Repetitive but redeemed
Review: I cannot begin to tell you the disappointment I felt upon completing this book. Expecting another Kinsella masterpiece, I was disappointed, to say the least. The book was just overly repetitive and the plot was horrible. While the IOWA BASEBALL CONFEDERACY kept me interested, BOX SOCIALS had me wishing it was finished already. If I read about hot-blooded girls and the Little American Soldier one more time, I think I was going to go postal. Mr. Kinsella, will you refund the cover price for me?? And if this is the best you can do, it's about time to head out to pasture!

Rating:
Summary: A great novel! My fav of all time!
Review: I've read this book over and over again and I'm still not tired of it. I was assigned to read this book over the summer by my dad, and loved it! So realistic! I was amazed of how I could relate to Jamie (the main character). One of the Kinsella books more easily found, but at a great price here on Amazon.com. A must-read-right-now book. Once you start, you just can't stop! It's worse than chips! I recommend it to all of my friends

Rating:
Summary: simply astounding
Review: The view into the life of an alberta youth by kinsella is a one of a kind book. Kinsella wraps you into the culture of the small town in which the novel is based, doing an incomperable job of getting you involved with not only the lead, but every character involved. They way in which Kinsella writes this book, it is as if it wasn't a novel at all, but an autobiography; as if Kinsella had lived through the story. An unparalelled work, I find myself buying a copy of this book every 5 years or so as the binding wears thin from overuse. One that stands alone with a forever reserved spot in my life

Rating:
Summary: Avoid this book like the plague that it is
Review: This book is horrible, plain and simple. It is repetitive, there is no point to it, and it has almost nothing to do with baseball. Kinsella, a genius that wrote SHOELESS JOE, let me and you down with this horrible (should i even say) effort. If you read this book, you are wasting your time. I wish I hadn't wasted my money on it. Maybe Mr. Kinsella will refund the cover price? I sure hope so!

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: 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: 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.