Operation Wandering Soul

USA Today

If you have children or will have children, if you know children or can remember being a child, dare to read Operation Wandering Soul...Dense in knowledge, rich in imagination, powerful in expression, [it] is bedtime reading for the future. Like the stories read to children, this intensely caring novel can help prevent the nightmare it describes, children out too late at night, far from home, lost, the wandering souls of the future, our future.

Washington Post Book World

Powers's prose soars like the most magnificent of choirs, memorably capturing the moments of joy and anguish, barrenness and grace, that add up to life.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Powers, the certified (by a MacArthur grant) genius whose last novel was the much-admired Gold Bug Variations , continues to baffle and excite with his new book. Set in the pediatric ward of a big L.A. hospital in the apparently near future, it is a vast, impassioned fantasy-allegory about the plight of the world's children in a time of cynicism, corruption and easy destruction of life. The only recognizable adults are surgical resident Richard Kraft, desperately weary of trying to patch up the shattered lives and bodies of innocents, and therapist Linda Espera, who tries to instill hope through storytelling and play-acting. The two are deeply involved with a band of patients led by a precociously wise but hopelessly crippled Thai girl and a cynical, commanding boy whose rare disease has withered his body into that of an old man. Richard and Linda evoke for the children, or share with the reader, various factual and fabulous accounts of endangered children through the centuries: England during the blitz, the Pied Piper legend rendered amazingly contemporary, the abortive medieval Children's Crusade portrayed by a comic book, flashes of Peter Pan. As always with Powers, the verbal dexterity is amazing, but ultimately exhausting. He is quite capable of fluent sequential narrative, and readers will be relieved when he lapses into it after all the self-conscious brilliance and endlessly impressive allusion. Powers has a remarkable, virtuoso voice and much to say with it, but he desperately needs to curb his apparent need to show it off. (May)

Library Journal

Although shorter than Powers's massive and magnificent The Gold Bug Variations ( LJ 6/15/91), this remarkable novel is just as packed with allusions from literature, history, science, folklore, medicine, and music. On the surface, it is the story of the doomed romance between an overworked, emotionally exhausted pediatric surgeon and a physical therapist and of their efforts to rescue the children in their care from their prescribed fates. But beneath its cover story--and this novel plumbs great depths--this is nothing less than the story of humankind, with the Pied Piper as central metaphor. That tale is turned into traveling theater by the hospital kids and its text provided with such historical glosses as the Children's Crusade and the mass evacuation of school children from London during the Blitz. What are we doing here? Where are we going? These questions echo throughout the book, but finding answers is left to the reader. A dazzling performance: delightful, dismaying, disturbing, doing all that novels are meant to do.-- Charles Michaud, Turner Free Lib., Randolph, Mass.

Kirkus Reviews

Childhood innocence—imperiled through the ages and nowhere more at risk than in the heart of modern Los Angeles—stands as the imposing theme of Powers's latest complex, wrenching saga. As overwhelming and erudite as its acclaimed predecessor, The Gold Bug Variations (1991), here evidence of children at odds with the adult world in which they live abounds, from the legend of the Pied Piper to tragic details of the Children's Crusade to more recent obliterations of youthful dreams in Southeast Asia and Watts. Holding this savage, sorrowful indictment of post-adolescent behavior together is the tale of a pediatrics ward in an inner-city hospital, into which the world's indigent wounded are thrown with abandon. Cared for by a fiercely protective therapist and a sensitive surgical resident—themselves careworn and devastated by traumas of youth, but seeking redemption—the ward acquires a life and plan of its own when Joy, a Laotian boat girl whose ravenous appetite for knowledge cannot stave off the rot consuming her from the ankles up, and Nicolino, a street-wise, shrewd trader in comics and other commodities wizened well before his time by Methuselah Syndrome, take the situation in hand. Using a ward-wide production of the Pied Piper story presented to the outside world as their means, they plot a mass escape in order to become masters of their own fates—but their designs for liberation falter before the realities of disease and adult agendas. Mingling wisps of whimsy and a hard-edged, surgical view, this cuts deeply into the human condition—to a dark, profoundly troubled place where hope and despair exist side by side.