This is one of Vanwell’s first excursions into children’s fiction and it promises good things.

Matt Killburn is miserable because his mother is making him move from Kitchener to a farm in the country, leaving behind his best friend and his beloved baseball team. But Matt does not find himself on an ordinary farm. The strangely remodelled barn at his new abode was once home to Butts Wagner, inventor of the Wagner Whacker, a bat that could revolutionize baseball.

When Matt is inexplicably hit on the head by some old machinery in the barn, he dreams of Butts and his neighbour, Jimmy Fox. The dream forms the bulk of the book. In it, Butts and Jimmy struggle to make a load of bats and get them to the Pittsburgh Pirates for an exhibition game. It’s a tale about wish fulfillment and the mythology of baseball and should prove irresistible to any 12- or 13-year-old minor leaguer. The dream is a strong story, stronger in fact than the “reality” that surrounds it. Matt’s waking life has some forced plot devices (his mother goes out to get pizza after Matt mysteriously collapses, not something a parent would likely do) and some corny adult dialogue (“What’s buggin’ you Matt? It’s all over your face like an outbreak of adolescent acne.”)

The baseball dream is reminiscent of Kinsella’s stories (one of which is even referred to). Author Joseph Romain – a philosopher, children’s performer, and past curator of the Hockey Hall of Fame, among many other occupations – has done a fine job of creating the feeling of a vanished world when baseball players were, or should have been, heroes. Unfortunately, the dream is set in the days before the First World War, when Kitchener was called Berlin and Honus Wagner played for Pittsburgh, yet the year of the dream is 1928. This is a disappointing flaw for an otherwise accurate book.

Young baseball fans should thoroughly enjoy the exploits of Matt and his dream friends. Perhaps aficionados will even enjoy catching Romain on the temporal flaws. Nonetheless, this is a solid book with an excellent sense of time and place, and enough mystery and adventure to satisfy even readers who aren’t baseball devotees.