I HAD SEEN CASTLES

John Dante is so enmeshed in WW II's patriotic fever that he can hardly wait for his 18th birthday, in 1942, to enlist. Meanwhile, his sister, stricken with empathy and concern, is engaged to two soldiers and pregnant by a third; Dad, a nuclear physicist, is called from Pittsburgh to California for secret research; and John falls sweetly, ardently in love with pretty Ginny, who urges him to become a conscientious objector. To John, her fervent pacifism is incomprehensible; but as he endures active combat, without relief, until 1945, stereotypes give way to the reality of the enemy's humanity, and Ginny's ideas become clear. Still, after his long immersion in horror, John never communicates with her again—until a message at the end of this novel, narrated in 1992 when he's a retired professor in Canada: ``I want you to know that I am really alive. And I still love you.'' Yet John has not been ``alive'' as he might have been: a lifelong solitary, he was even driven from his home by the war (``I could not stay in America because America had not suffered''). Excising all but the essential explanations (we never learn how Ginny became a CO) to focus on John's spiritual journey and the events that shape it, Rylant depicts—with some irony and much insight and compassion—the tragedy of young men putting aside their true selves (``We were the ghosts of boys and we had come to believe in nothing but each other'') to meet war's terrible demands. A brief tale, in wonderfully spare language and imagery, with a poignant love story and an unexpectedly quiet, melancholy conclusion. (Fiction. 12+)