SUMMER AT WORLD'S END

In last year's House at World's End the four Fielding children coped in the country while Mother was in the hospital and Father gone to sea. Now with both parents off cruising in their homemade boat, the offspring are still stretching pennies and bread puddings, kidnapping mistreated animals, and dodging authorities who might want to end their happily unsupervised existence. In addition to the horses, dogs, cats, donkey, and monkey, they are joined by a human runaway, graduate of a girls' reform school -- but the big news is the disappearance of several local dogs who are probably being stolen and sold to the medical school. Carrie Fielding finally exposes the thieves and frees the dogs, but it is not until the last page that she and the boys snatch their own missing dog from the medical school surgery table, just in time to save him from an experimental aorta transplant. An adultless open house for children and animals may well be the stuff that daydreams are made of, but the residents of World's End haven't changed a bit since we met them in the first volume and by now their liberated life is settling into a routine.