THE LION CUB

Compared to the author's usually excellent stories about Ireland, The Lion Cub is just a runt. A mild, very contrived little daydream, it deals with eight year old Mark who is taken to the zoo, and snitches a lion cub on the way out. he and his older sister Catherine try to bring up the cub on their farm and keep it completely secret. Eventually all the neighbors find out and only Mark's parents are ignorant until the day that the townspeople unite to demand the eviction of the cub. That the parents should be so unwitting, that Mark should return the cub with complete lack of concern, and that the keeper should have been confident all along that the animal would be brought back--all seem to push logic too far with too little compensation from the uneventful story.