Best known for her "uncompromising integrity," according to Horn Book's Alice Bach, American writer Paula Fox has crafted distinguished careers in both children's books and adult fiction. Among the former are novels such as The Slave Dancer, One-Eyed Cat, The Village by the Sea, Monkey Island, The Eagle Kite, and Radiance Descending. In such juvenile and YA novels Fox pulls no punches; she deals with subjects from abandonment to the misery of AIDS and puts her youthful protagonists in difficult situations and exotic locales, from an island off the coast of northeastern America to an island in the Aegean. "Children know about pain and fear and unhappiness and betrayal," Fox once told Authors and Artists for Young Adults (AAYA). "And we do them a disservice by trying to sugarcoat dark truths. . . . We must never, ever try to pull the wool over children's eyes by 'watering down' powerful...