Not since Dorothy was whisked off to Oz have I encountered a Dorothy as impressionable and thoroughly sympathetic as the heroine of Rosemary Wells's "Leave Well Enough Alone." In this novel, set in 1956, Dorothy, almost 15, a policeman's daughter and student at the Sacred Heart School in Newburgh, N.Y., finds herself transported to Llewellyn, Pa. where, for the magnificent sum of $400, she is to spend the summer taking care of two beastly little girls.

At first blink, Maria and John Hoade's Llewellyn estate with its pastoral beauty and fabulous parties seems like an Emerald City to Dorothy Coughlin; but as the green glasses begin to slip down her nose she realizes that the place reeks of menace, mystery and lies. (p. 20)

As Dorothy pursues clue after clue in her search for truth and in a desire to gain personal recognition, she also begins to discover that the world...