KASPIAN LOST

Another supernatural adventure in Maine, the eighth from the author of, most recently, the fey and moody In the Land of Winter (1997). Here, 15-year-old Kaspian Aaby follows three leprechauns who lead him into a cave where he encounters a life-sized girl- daimon, some kind of emissary from . . . well, from the fiery carousel Kaspian sees called the Wheel ‘O the Dead. The Wheel has summoned up his father, who died when the boy was six and left him under the rule of his short-tempered stepmother, school psychologist Carol Deacon Aaby. Carol has sent Kaspian off to the Accelerated Skills Acquisition Camp outside Florence, Maine, to have him prepped for shipment to a high-bandwidth academy at the cutting edge of pedagogy. But the disaffected outsider Kaspian feels put upon during the camp’s rougher games and takes off into the woods, where he meets the leprechauns. When he awakes from his encounter with the daimon, four days have passed and Kaspian has been transported 60 miles from Florence to Sinai Falls. There, he’s taken in by Inanna (named after the Sumerian Queen of Heaven and Earth); her son, Malcolm, a student of ecosystems, explains to the boy that Earth is alive and all living things are connected. Everything, Malcolm asserts, has consciousness; even the soil is full of organisms. What happened to Kaspian’s missing four days? Wary readers know they—ll have to wait for the close to find out, but that the lacuna will also have to do with Earth-consciousness, Kaspian’s father, and a plastic bear he lost at age six. A likable teenage protagonist and, this time around, a storyline that isn—t supersaturated with sentimentality: both make for Grant’s best to date.