This is the story of an enchantment and its dramatic consequences. At the centre is the frustrated love of a man in his forties for a fourteen-year-old girl whom he meets and befriends. Drawn into her strange family and the haunting world of Childwold, he discovers that, while others find freedom for themselves, for him there is no escape. (From cover) "[A] blowsy mother whose many children have many fathers; her 14-year-old daughter, Laney, and Kasch, an anguished intellectual who loves them both...The novel's tight Oedipal triangle opens into a triple alliance against age and aggression as each person tries to turn the biological clock back towards innocence. Laney's mother wants to bear children to narrow the world to a child's room. Laney starves herself to stop her menstrual cycle and prolong her childhood. Kasch in his insanity is harmless, nonsexual, helpless...Drawn by his vulnerability in the same way that Kasch was drawn by her poverty, Laney may cling to Kasch and he to her as children cling together in the dark." (New York Times, 11/28/76)