Roy Adams, fourteen in the 1940's, is the nucleus of two tensile relationships: with his father Jack, angry, degenerate, suspicious of everything white and unsympathetic to Roy's ambition to become an auto-mechanic; and with the new local teacher Miss Green, key to eight-grade graduation, the one prerequisite for the technical schooling Roy craves. Her old Model A is a magnet but Roy stays mistrustful until she shows him the rare pair of sea otters: she pledges him to secrecy, he thinks she's after their valuable pelts but learns differently -- nobody kills a sea otter; Roy later defends them against a maniacal hunter... his father. The otters' entry into the story is oddly executed by means of shared chapters paralleling their movements to those of the land-pairs, a technique that does call attention to itself. But if the correspondence is not entirely smooth or viable, every detail of both portraits is managed impeccably. This remains Roy's story, told with impressive integrity to the time and the place and the people. KIRKUS REVIEW