In the pediatrics ward of a public hospital in the heart of Angel City, a group of sick children is gathering. An Asian boat girl, a freakishly aging boy, a child born with no face: they share nothing but their desperation and the journey they know lies ahead of them. The surrogate parents of this band - surgical resident Richard Kraft, overworked to the point of collapse, and therapist Linda Espera, awash with idealism - are charged with keeping these strays alive on make-believe alone. The anthology of story-cures to which the ward pins its hopes doubles back repeatedly on one emergent theme: children, cut loose, wandering too late at night, too far from home. The Pied Piper, the evacuation of London, the Children's Crusade, Peter Pan, and an accumulating texture of fact and fantasy combine to reveal to the adults the forgotten place they came from and to prepare the children for the hidden destination they are off to. This is a story about imagination and memory combining to create an alternative to the hopelessness of Here. At once a social indictment and an intensely emotional account of intimate need, Operation Wandering Soul asks how we might yet delay our bedtime story's rapidly approaching ending and keep alive a little longer the vanishing narrative of childhood. Although shorter than Powers's massive and magnificent The Gold Bug Variations ( LJ 6/15/91), this remarkable novel is just as packed with allusions from literature, history, science, folklore, medicine, and music. On the surface, it is the story of the doomed romance between an overworked, emotionally exhausted pediatric surgeon and a physical therapist and of their efforts to rescue the children in their care from their prescribed fates. But beneath its cover story--and this novel plumbs great depths--this is nothing less than the story of humankind, with the Pied Piper as central metaphor. That tale is turned into traveling theater by the hospital kids and its text provided with such historical glosses as the Children's Crusade and the mass evacuation of school children from London during the Blitz. What are we doing here? Where are we going? These questions echo throughout the book, but finding answers is left to the reader. A dazzling performance: delightful, dismaying, disturbing, doing all that novels are meant to do. - Charles Michaud, Turner Free Lib., Randolph, Mass. Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. Childhood innocence--imperiled through the ages and nowhere more at risk than in the heart of modern Los Angeles--stands as the imposing theme of Powers's latest complex, wrenching saga. As overwhelming and erudite as its acclaimed predecessor, The Gold Bug Variations (1991), here evidence of children at odds with the adult world in which they live abounds, from the legend of the Pied Piper to tragic details of the Children's Crusade to more recent obliterations of youthful dreams in Southeast Asia and Watts. Holding this savage, sorrowful indictment of post-adolescent behavior together is the tale of a pediatrics ward in an inner-city hospital, into which the world's indigent wounded are thrown with abandon. Cared for by a fiercely protective therapist and a sensitive surgical resident--themselves careworn and devastated by traumas of youth, but seeking redemption--the ward acquires a life and plan of its own when Joy, a Laotian boat girl whose ravenous appetite for knowledge cannot stave off the rot consuming her from the ankles up, and Nicolino, a street-wise, shrewd trader in comics and other commodities wizened well before his time by Methuselah Syndrome, take the situation in hand. Using a ward-wide production of the Pied Piper story presented to the outside world as their means, they plot a mass escape in order to become masters of their own fates--but their designs for liberation falter before the realities of disease and adult agendas. Mingling wisps of whimsy and a hard-edged, surgical view, this cuts deeply into the human condition--to a dark, profoundly troubled place where hope and despair exist side by side. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.