New youth fiction book takes place in polio ward in 1950s

The Wall Street Journal book review:

Readers ages 10 to 14 who are fond of adventure and fantasy will naturally be inclined to pick up "The Giant-Slayer": On the novel's cover there's a menacing giant, a gnome, a unicorn, a gryphon and even a snaky hydra. But children who are drawn to pathos and history may not realize that this is a book for them, too.

In fact, Iain Lawrence is really writing more for them than for the fantasy buffs. The setting is a hospital polio ward in the spring of 1955. Dr. Jonas Salk is on the brink of perfecting the vaccine that will soon spare Americans the recurring horror of a disease that usually appeared in summer and struck tens of thousands of children.

Into the polio ward comes a lonely 11-year-old named Laurie Valentine; she's there reluctantly, to visit her only real friend, a younger child named Dickie. A few weeks earlier, Dickie was wearing a coonskin cap and playing with her in a creek.

Now the boy and two other children lie paralyzed, with only their heads poking out of the huge iron lungs that breathe for them.

"It looked as though their bodies had been swallowed by the cylinders, because the metal things seemed so much alive," we read of the machines. "Their rubber lungs worked below their bellies, and [Laurie] watched them stretch and shrink, fill and empty."

To comfort Dickie, the girl begins telling a story of a cruel giant and the tiny boy who vows to slay him. Laurie's ever-more-dramatic narrative eventually becomes so entwined with the emotional lives of the "polios," that, when she suddenly cannot finish the tale, they take turns carrying on the adventure.

"Life's a story, and you can tell it any way you want," says a character in the tale-within-the-tale, but of course that's only partly true. Young readers who know polio solely as something they're immunized against will not quickly forget this moving, imaginative glimpse of the not-so-long-ago past.