THE WHITE SPARROW

The further adventures of homeless Sprog, last seen in Flight of Sparrows (KR, 1973) wandering near London with the speechless and disfigured Boy who, with the Boy's three-legged mutt, shares his dismal shelters and stolen food. Here as winter sets in the trio wanders from leaky warehouse to abandoned, drafty crane to timber stack, ending up in a relatively cushy doll factory where they are taken, feverish from exposure and near starvation, by a motherly sort of little girl named Connie Angel. At last Sprog takes a job with Connie's sympathetic father, a junk dealer, and eventually goes off to live with the motherless family; the Boy takes off, hurt by Sprog's venture into the world, to be chased by local kids and almost certainly drowned. Again Brown does a good job of conveying the bleakness and peril of the two fugitives' existence; the best way to read this is to expect nothing more.