The Jungle Law

In 1892, at the age of twenty-six, Rudyard Kipling arrived in Vermont, virtually penniless with a newly pregnant wife and the germ of a story about a feral child who was raised by a pack of wolves. Having fled the literary high life in London, he hoped to find a quiet corner in which to raise a family and work, where he might build a sanctuary that could offer him refuge from the scrutiny incurred by his burgeoning fame and the wounds of his own troubled past. From this literary footnote, first-time novelist Victoria Vinton has fashioned a tale of wisdom and grace as she tracks Kipling's ultimately doomed attempt to establish a home in Vermont. She brings to life Kipling's early years in Bombay where he lived as the pampered rapscallion son of a well-connected British family and limns the repercussions of the abandonment he felt when, at the age six, he was severed from his family and sent to live in a foster home in England that he later dubbed ?The House of Desolation.? And she shows how those experiences formed the basis of his art, as out of this cauldron of comfort and pain he wrote The Jungle Books and created his most enduring character Mowgli. Mixing fact and invention, Vinton parallels Kipling's story with that of his neighbor?s, the Connollys, who, like Kipling, have come to Vermont to forge a better life but who are forced to question the decisions they have made in the wake of Kipling's presence in their lives. There is Joe, the Connolly's eleven-year-old son, who finds himself drawn to Kipling and his stories, seeing in the tales and adventures of Mowgli a template for his own self-transcendence. There is Jack, his father, who views Kipling's influence over his son as achallenge to his very sense of self. And there is Addie, Jack's wife, whose task it becomes to somehow embrace and assimilate these changes in order to hold onto her family.