The Changing Maze

Honored for her work as a novelist, Snyder achieves extraordinary effects in a fantasy here, illuminated by Mikolaycak's marvelous scenes. Muted colors and looming figures pulsate with the ominous airs in the author's lyrical tale about a shepherd boy, Hugh, and his black lamb. Hugh knows from his granny that the ruins of an old habitation must be avoided. It was owned many years before, she says, by a wicked king who hired a wizard to make the garden's changing maze. All who try to penetrate the maze are trapped and die, never reaching the promised casket of gold at the exit. When Hugh's lamb runs away and is caught in the haunted greenery, he enters the evil and survives to go home with his beloved pet. He finds the treasures and, as he tells his granny, he might have taken it but it was more important to rescue the lamb. ""That's what saved you,'' she says. (59)