It was a hot day and they had already seen the movie at the only theater in town. Yet the game that Julian devised to relieve the boredom--the game of Takers and Returners--was to affect the lives of all the children who took part in it. Julian was fifteen, and thirteen-year-old Ellen had always thought she might marry him someday--that is, until Mother explained that he had a kind of fatal fascination. It was the quality that made you want to follow his leadership. Otherwise, they would never have let the game get out of hand the way it did, for it was an unusual, frightening game, of which the adults would not have approved. In this skillfully written suspense story Carol Beach York provides an atmosphere so full of tension and anxiety that it becomes almost un bearable, and the reader soon realizes that it is also a story of evil and that the game the children play is one no one can win.