THORN

The prehistoric People of the Singing Seals live on the brink of dissolution: food scarcity, low birth rate and high number of babies with birth defects. A strange boat sails into and out of their harbor, leaving behind Thorn, a boy with an atrophied leg. The clan’s adults exile Thorn until they can decide his future, but Willow befriends him, first out of curiosity, then from a desire to learn from him. The story revolves around their relationship. Alternating chapters—Thorn’s in first-person narrative, Willow’s in omniscient observers—center the book and convey the conflicts motivating the clan. Minor flaws—weakness in world building, underdeveloped secondary characters and an occasional jarring use of language—slightly mar an unusually fine offering. Levin raises important issues about how a community treats its weakest, about the necessity for communities to grow and about the role of creativity in society. Strongly lyrical writing, the unusual structure and provocative themes distinguish a stimulating work that evokes comparison with Peter Dickinson’s Bone from a Dry Sea and Lois Lowry’s The Giver. (Fiction. 11-14)