Children From Another Planet

Born Into Light by Paul Samuel Jacobs (Scholastic: $11.95, hardcover, 149 pages)

To be quite candid, I’m cool on fantasy in general, downright chilly on science fiction.

Shivers, then, on the arrival of “Born Into Light,” described on the jacket flap as science fiction. The subject, feral children, sounded like something you would find in one of those newspapers with sensational headlines sold at checkout counters. The title emitted quasi-religious vibrations.

My objections vanished on the first page. By the end of the chapter, I was charmed.

The story is told by an unusual narrator, an “aged scientist, winner of prizes, an ugly old man,” who recalls events in his youth more than 70 years past. Roger Westwood was 10 years old in 1913 when a strange creature dashed out of the New England woods and into the lives of the Westwoods. The family took him in, began to civilize him, teaching him to talk and to use a knife and fork, and named him Benjamin.

As other such children turn up, Roger learns that they are travelers from a distant star, sent to our small planet to intermarry with more robust Earthlings so that their hybrid offspring will carry the best of both gene pools on their celestial journey. What happens to them all when they gather on the last day of spring in 1923 is the climax of the story.

Fantasy is a fragile structure that collapses under the weight of one false element; convincing details lull the reader into the willing suspension of disbelief. Jacobs, a newspaper journalist, has a solid grip on those details.