Childwold Author:Joyce Carol Oates At the center of this novel is the frustrated love of a man in his forties for a very young girl whom he meets by accident and befriends. Kasch is a lonely eccentric who has survived a bitterly disappointing marriage only to fall in love, against his will, with a fourteen-year-old named Laney. An inhabitant of a distant, impoverished region - ... more »Childwold - Laney embodies all that Kasch finds fatally iresistible. As Kasch succumbs to the beauty and mystery of Childwold and Laney's family, his control over his destiny loosens and he is plunged into personal catastrophe, even as Laney and her family are freed.« less