SOURCE: Cheuse, Alan. “An Outsider's Homage to Baseball Lore.” Los Angeles Times (23 May 1982): 12.

In the following review, Cheuse provides a positive assessment of Shoeless Joe, praising the “world of compelling whimsy” that Kinsella created in the novel.

It was probably only a matter of time, one says with perfect hindsight, before the formation of the Canadian professional baseball franchises led to the appearance of a Canadian novelist with a penchant for writing about the peculiarly North American sport. So on the mound this spring we find W. P. Kinsella, formerly a short-story writer from Calgary in the Canadian leagues, pitching at us an utterly disarming, whimsical knuckler of a novel that won the prestigious Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award for 1982. It's called Shoeless Joe and it stands as fictional homage to our national pastime, with resonances so American that the book may be grounds for abolishing our northern...