Kit

Kit, the 12-year-old protagonist, has lost his parents in a car accident which may or may not have been a suicide; a few months later he is declared “autistic” and sent to an asylum in the English country. There an assortment of quarrelling eccentrics, each wedded to a different social, political or psychiatric system, tries to bring him back to mental health.

It also happens that shut up in the Adult Unit of the same hospital is a 34-year-old bachelor by the name of Paul Baxter. Baxter is not mentally ill, although he does have his hours with a psychiatrist, but has been put there in lieu of a prison sentence, for he is a convicted “child molester”. Paul and Kit meet and, through the natural therapy of love and sexual pleasure, the boy begins to recover — despite the efforts of the hospital staff.

Excerpt of a review in Pan: a magazine about boy-love, XV (March 1983) pp. 24-5.