Summerland

I think this will be a really entertaining book for teens that enjoy fantasy and mythology or tall-tales. It's not as much about baseball as about the fantasy land Chabon creates and the relationship of father and son. I've had a few students read it that really enjoyed it as well. I'm glad Chabon is doing stories for teens as well!

The description sounds good, eh? I read this aloud to the kids. About a hundred pages in I started having misgivings. I did not enjoy this book. But the kids would've been out of sorts had I not finished it (they'll listen to almost anything). I don't really have anything good to say about this book. While I've read other books by the author and really liked them, this one counts as a FAIL. (For the record, my wife really enjoyed it.) Here's what I didn't like about it:

a) the writing style: too flowery; hard to read aloud; choppy sentences that went all over the place
b) the story: take a bunch of folklore, myth, and baseball and mix it all up into a miasmic stew. And I couldn't follow it very well. New things seemed to be added willy-nilly. Tangents would shoot off in mid-sentence so that I'd lose track of what the subject was supposed to be. Didn't get any sense of suspense either. The climax was anti.
c) the length: 500 pages! what a mess.

I hated this.

(Read the 1-star reviews on Amazon, they're spot on.)