Shoeless Joe & Me
The Baseball Card Adventures is a novel series written by Dan Gutman. So far there are 11 books in the series. The most recent book, Ted & Me, was released on March 20, 2012. The 12th and final book, Bobby & Me, is expected to be released in March 2014. The books feature a boy, Joe Stoshack, who can travel through time when he touches old baseball cards. When he holds a baseball card, he is transported to the year that card was made and somewhere near the ballplayer on the card. Later he discovers that this power also works on very old photographs. He tries to use this power wisely, and he attempts to change history several times, but it is always something different from his original goal.
The novels are typically illustrated with black and white photos from the time period in which the story takes place. For an example, when Jackie Robinson steals second base in Jackie & Me, a real photo of Jackie Robinson stealing a base is pictured. Occasionally they will also be illustrated with pictures taken exclusively for the book.
The Cambridge Companion to Baseball in its review of baseball fiction calls the books "an eclectic enterprise" which "uninhibitedly embraces the genre's cliches." Library Journal called them "good examples" of traditional sports novels.
Read more about Shoeless Joe & Me: Titles in The Series
Famous quotes containing the word joe:
“This might be the end of the world. If Joe lost we were back in slavery and beyond help. It would all be true, the accusations that we were lower types of human beings. Only a little higher than apes. True that we were stupid and ugly and lazy and dirty and, unlucky and worst of all, that God Himself hated us and ordained us to be hewers of wood and drawers of water, forever and ever, world without end.”
—Maya Angelou (b. 1928)