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  • The Barnstormers: Tales of the Travelin' Nine: Game 1, Porkopolis
  • Elizabeth Bush
Long, Loren The Barnstormers: Tales of the Travelin' Nine: Game 1, Porkopolis; by Loren Long and Phil Bildner; illus. by Loren Long. Simon, 2007 [144p] Paper ed. ISBN 1-4169-1863-9$9.99 Reviewed from galleys M Gr. 3-5

The Pain siblings—Griffith, Ruby, and Graham—are finishing out the last summer of the nineteenth century on the road with their deceased father's barnstorming baseball club, the Travelin' Nine, comprising a group of Rough Rider veterans who are just getting the hang of the game. In this debut volume of a series, Long and Bildner provide their protagonists with a laundry list of upcoming challenges to meet and mysteries to solve, including Mom's masquerading as a man to play catcher, an urgent but unspecified need for lots of cash, the appearance of ghostly train signals and locomotives popping up on the diamond, warnings of danger from wheelchair-using Uncle Wen, and a baseball that trembles and quivers for no apparent reason. There's a decent amount of play action in the Nines' match-up with the Cincinnati Swine, but by the book's end no plot points are any nearer to resolution and readers are left to conclude that their investment of time has earned no real [End Page 335] payoff. If they do come away with anything, it's an expanded glossary of baseball terms (some arcane), which the authors copiously annotate in the margins. A little argot goes a long way: "Indeed, the cranks [hometown fans] were everywhere" feels authentic, but "An uncharacteristic muff by Happy on an easy comebacker plated still another ace" is just excessive, and the remainder of the writing is bland and pedestrian. Black and white charcoal illustrations and spot art, deeply shadowed and tinged with hazy sadness, create an appealing aura of nostalgia and impending woe that quite nearly succeeds where the text falters. Determined baseball fans might be lured back for the next promised game in Louisville, but most kids, one suspects, will wander off in search of greener fields.

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