SOURCE: Lewis, Maggie. “A Fantasy for Baseball Lovers.” Christian Science Monitor (9 July 1982): 14.

In the following review, Lewis argues that, despite some “mawkish” passages, Shoeless Joe is a poetic and emotionally satisfying novel.

To say W. P. Kinsella's Shoeless Joe is a book about resurrection and baseball makes it sound foreboding and silly, and sometimes it is, but that doesn't matter at all.

Shoeless Joe is a fantasy about an Iowa farmer who gets a message to build a baseball diamond, so that Shoeless Joe Jackson, a legendary baseball star who was banned from the game for alleged complicity in throwing the 1919 World Series, will come back and play on it. The message is in the form of a voice, a crackly-with-static baseball announcer's voice, that no one else can hear. He builds it, and Joe comes back, with, eventually, a whole phantom team. There are also phantom popcorn...