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Mixing nostalgia, baseball and a boy's mostly epistolary friendship with a 1940s baseball star, this inventive but sentimental novel consists entirely of letters, fictional newspaper clippings, telegrams, war dispatches, report cards and other documentary fragments. Growing up Jewish in a tough, Italian Brooklyn neighborhood, Joey Margolis is troubled by anti-Semitic neighbors, by Hitler's rising power, by his parents' divorce and by his absent cad of a father. Craving a surrogate dad, Joey strikes up a correspondence with Wisconsin-born New York Giants slugger Charlie Banks. The boy's outrageous fibs, tough-guy posturing and desperate pleas grab the reluctant attention of the superstar, whose racy vernacular guy-talk (peppered with amusing misspellings and misusages) hints at his deepening affection for Joey. Charlie is a politically enlightened proletarian ballplayer with a heart of gold. His liberal views find an echo in Joey, whose best friend, Japanese-American Craig Nakamura, gets shipped off with his family to a wartime internment camp. In a plot that swerves from Joey's Bar Mitzvah to a White House meeting with President Roosevelt to a tearjerking climax, Kluger keeps changing the pace and piles on a slew of period references with a heavy hand. Despite these flaws, this debut novel is at its best a poignant, golden evocation of one boy's lost innocence. 

在孩子的内心，都渴望有一个英雄式的人物来保护自己，大多数时候这个角色担当是父亲。然而布鲁克林12 岁的乔伊来自一个不幸的家庭，父亲抛弃了乔伊和妈妈。他行为大胆乖张，从9 岁开始就和白宫通信，预测二战欧洲战争局势、美国总统大选结果，准确率高得让罗斯福震惊。他每天过着孤单而被欺侮的日子，渴望有个英雄出现来救他，这时，他选择了20 岁的棒球明星查理。查理快人快语，行事鲁莽，有着不为人知的童年经历。他本来将乔伊当成疯狂的球迷，不屑一顾，谁知道一通信就再也停不下来。两人在信中捉弄、挖苦对方，又尽情地说笑，但在爆笑的言语中，让人感受到的却是两人家人般的相扶与温暖，真挚得令人心酸落泪。
在乔伊的记忆中，布鲁克林根本没有父亲的存在，只有查理，从前是，以后也永远是。