The Longest Home Run Book

“The longest home run in the history of baseball was hit by a girl.” So begins a baseball misadventure in the village of Ste. Justine. This time, a strange girl named Adeline shows up at the daisy field where Roch and his friends play baseball all summer. She proceeds to hit a towering home run…right through the window of the crankiest man in town. Adeline has other powers as well, which Roch and the boys discover at a magic show. But without the baseball, the game cannot go on. When Adeline literally disappears, who do you think has to get the ball back?

School Library Journal

K-Gr 3-Whether it was lost in the translation or wasn't there to begin with, the story line in this picture book is fragmented and not the least bit interesting. A stranger named Adeline asks to join a group of boys playing baseball and promptly hits the longest home run any of the participants have ever witnessed. Before leaving the ballpark, she reveals that she's a magician and invites the team to her show that evening. Thoroughly impressed with Adeline's performance, the youngsters wait outside the theater for her until her father, also part of the act, retorts when asked of her whereabouts, "`Adeline? I made her disappear.'" The story ends abruptly when the narrator goes to retrieve the ball Adeline hit from the home of the feared Sergeant Bouton, whose window it smashed through. Large, brightly colored paintings, while better executed than the text, fail to rescue this mundane offering.-Tom S. Hurlburt, La Crosse Public Library, WI