BELOVED EXILES

You need go no further than the title to realize that this is an old-fashioned book saved by the fact that it is not only true to its time (before and during World War II) but also to the experiences which Agnes Newton Keith wrote about in her earliest Borneo books and her own imprisonment by the Japanese (Land Below the Wind,' Three Came Home). Sara, an American girl, goes out there as the wife of British Charles Evans and her first innovative and determined act will be to adopt the child, Hal, Charles had had by the native Yuki whom Sara has displaced. And to become Hal's mother although he is more apt to hang around the kitchen and talk ""chi chi."" Not too long after she has Charles' child, and not too long after that they become prisoners of war although it seems safer for Hal to be returned to his natural mother. Her own infant dies for lack of proper drugs; it seems that Charles will be executed although Sara, via the Japanese camp commandant, still manages to exchange her body for his life. The last inset, with the breakup of a longstanding white-native relationship, is the envoi to the world she once knew, a world of color in which the color scheme would be reversed. . . . If you can overlook the dictates of your intelligence, you'll find she has managed to summon up a good deal of sympathy which a more traditional readership will willingly extend.