STONEWOLF

A starving orphan finds no relief when he’s taken to a foreign castle in this awkwardly mysterious tale. When sinister Ranik adopts Nicholas from his dreadful orphanage, he’s still in danger. In Ranik’s castle (in some unspecified foreign land, shifting oddly between seeming Soviet, Slavic and science-fictional), Nicholas is usually treated well enough. But he’s a prisoner, and over the years, wicked Dr. Draum has injected him with drugs to gain information about Nicholas’s unremembered infancy. Nicholas’s only relief is a walled garden and a secret library full of books with which he teaches himself to read. Since the castle’s inhabitants don’t realize that Nicholas has also taught himself to speak their language, he discovers their plot to murder him. Along with Larka, the wacky New York girl who was brought in to pry information from Nicholas, he escapes from the castle, where he’s lived for years. Some suspense and excitement, but super-child Nicholas is too unreal to carry this offering very far. (Fiction. 8-11)