UN JARDIN VERS L'EST: A Garden Toward The East

This story of a little boy lost is both fantastic and fanciful, but not without an undeniable charm, a quality reminiscent of Daudet in Arabian Nights trappings. Peter Green, an imaginative, dreamy child is kidnapped at the age of ten and taken to an isolated, ruined palace on the northern coast of Africa, where he is watched over by the eccentric but kindly gypsy, Benita, and where he lives in complete happiness for a year with Benita, a native girl, and a donkey. After a year he is found and taken home, where he wastes away and dies -- homesick for this Garden of Eden he had found, the innocence and simplicity of a life unspoiled by civilization. It has an unreal fascination, a tender appeal, conveyed with fragility and a certain lyricism.