[Alfred and Guinevere] is a delectable little book about two children, a deft and funny creation of a high quality somewhere between the terror-haunted humor of Richard Hughes' A High Wind in Jamaica and the placid, presumably unself-conscious amusements of Daisy Ashford's The Young Visiters. James Schuyler's story consists entirely of conversations and excerpts from a diary kept by Guinevere….

Guinevere's brother Alfred is perhaps three or four years younger than she, but the two often manage to bridge the chasm of time between them with a mutual respect as generous as the sympathetic understanding with which they tolerate the adults in their lives…. These children, quite evidently a cut above the level of their friends, are capable of outlandish fantasies and defiances and hatreds, but they have a clear strain of sense, of charity even, of the ability to respond to sense and charity when, as sometimes...