Consider for a moment this plot: a 14-year-old girl who lives in a crowded city is by accident swept back into the primeval past. A world of cave men. At first horrified, she gradually learns to become one of them, discovers the joys and sorrows of primitive life and finds that she has bridged a metaphysical river where past, present and future are one. Suddenly she is returned to the modern world, but no one believes in her journey…. She is sent to a psychologist and learns to behave like a "normal" person. But the memory of an earlier, more beautiful life haunts her, and she prays never to forget, never to become ordinary…. Her story ends on a note of pain.

In synopsis, I find this idea fascinating. But in Norma Fox Mazer's rendition something has gone wrong. It is not only that ["Saturday, the Twelfth of...