Michael Newton's dismal book Savage Girls and Wild Boys disappoints because it's not what it seems from the title. It's one thing to say you've written a book about feral children who have been abandoned in the wilderness or locked up in solitary confinement in small rooms by cruel parents. It's quite another to go off on tangents, lose focus and end up writing too much about authors, psychiatrists, philosophers and scientists whose theories about these children are obsolete by today's standards.

Even the questions Newton poses are old ones. What's natural? Does such a thing exist? How do we differ from animals? Where does our identity come from, and what part does language play in it?

These were questions intellectuals asked centuries ago. Now, in the context of analyzing feral children, they transfer to ideas that are demeaning to children with tragic pasts.

Newton admits in his foreword that these are fragmented and disruptive biographies of a handful of children whose histories are partially lost. His book jerks readers around with piecemeal scenes that seldom flow gracefully together and are constantly dissatisfying.

In his chapter "Bodies Without Souls," we read of the first recorded history of a feral child, Peter the Wild Boy, who was found around 1726 in the cold Germanic woods and taken to London to live with King George I in the splendor of St. James. There, he became the object of a great rivalry between the king and his son and daughter-in-law.

Newton presents a small amount of material about the boy but then fills up his chapter with information about famous men of the time: George Frederick Handel, writers Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, who wrote Guilliver's Travel's, and Daniel Defoe, who considered Peter the Wild Boy to be less than human.

In the third chapter, "Lord Monboddo and the Savage Girl," Newton paints a much better view of feral children. In this account, the savage girl is Memmie, who's found in the French woods and taken to the kitchen of Viscount d'Epinoy in Sogi, France. Little by little, Memmie grows more tame, but in the beginning she's far from civilized.

Memmie's story is extraordinary because, unlike the other feral children in the book, she's able to bond with people, eventually ending up in a convent and finding such faith in the Catholic teachings that she considers becoming a nun.

She makes a small, modest living on one of the side streets behind the Hotel d'Ville in Paris, where she later dies.

To Newton's credit, he had great courage in taking on the challenge of writing about feral children. Unfortunately, fully rendered stories such as Memmie's are too few and far between. Void of relevant stories, the book collapses on itself.

Dolores Derrickson is a freelance writer living in Aurora.