JUNGLE HAVEN

The reader is led to believe that this incredible story has some foundation in fact, but the author has not succeeded in making it sound authentic. An over-educated youth, whose early years were spent in Mexico first with Yaqul foster parents, then with a prospectus, becomes tutor to two princes of a small Balkan country, and -- with the outbreak of revolution, obeys orders from the ruler to get the boys away. A succession of misadventures lands them, stripped of everything, in a South American jungle, and the tutor's training in various fields makes it possible for them to live on the things that nature provides until they are rescued. There is plenty of adventure along exaggeratedly routine jungle adventure castaway lines, but the style is ponderous and artificial, the dialogue very stilled.