Charles Dickens was the first writer in English to present children as literary characters meant to be taken seriously. His depictions of David Copperfield, Little Nell, Oliver Twist, the Artful Dodger, and numerous others uncovered a fertile literary field.

Among the scores of notable novelists who have capitalized on this field either by using child protagonists or by presenting their stories from children's points of view are Mark Twain in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Henry James in The Turn of the Screw (1898), J. D. Salinger in Catcher in the Rye (1951), Harper Lee in To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), Paul Zindel in The Pigman (1968), Jack Schaefer in Shane (1949), and countless others. Operation Wandering Soul is clearly a part of this tradition, although it in no way apes the books mentioned above.

Powers's novel is also one of a substantial number of...