JINGO DJANGO

Readers of Chancy and the Grand Rascal and By the Great Horn Spoon will enjoy the author's latest picaresque adventure set in mid-nineteenth-century America. Again a resourceful young orphan crosses the country with a mysterious, dashing adult who lives by his wits and his disarming bravado. In this version a Mr. Peacock-Hemlock-Jones, who changes names as rapidly as he does occupations, buys Jingo Hawks from a Boston orphanage, wins his admiration as the two outsmart and outbluff their way to Mexico, and finally reveals that he is the boy's father. The pair's incidental accomplishments include horse trading, portrait painting, riding with the gypsies, piloting a river scow to shipwreck in the Gulf of Mexico, and racing a pair of villains to a buried treasure which, once found, disappears into quicksand. If Fleischman fans recognize some of the landmarks this time around, they can still have a rollicking trip.