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A story of the explosive and redemptive powers of the imagination, set during the year Rudyard Kipling lived in Vermont and wrote The Jungle Books. 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, Victoria Vinton brings to life Kipling’s early years in Bombay, where he lived as the pampered son of a well-connected British family, and explores the repercussions of the abandonment he felt when, at 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.” She shows how those experiences formed the basis of his art, how from 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 neighbors, the Connollys, who are forced to question the decisions they have made in the wake of Kipling’s presence in their lives. There is eleven-year-old Joe Connolly, who finds himself drawn to Kipling and his stories, seeing in the adventures of Mowgli a template for his own escape. There is Jack, his father, who views Kipling’s influence over his son as a challenge to his very sense of self. And there is Addie, Jack’s wife, who must embrace and assimilate these changes in order to hold on to her family, confronted by the unsettling power of the imagination.
