A NECKLACE OF RAINDROPS

These eight brief stories feature some unconventional situations but their potential goes unrealized. In the title story, the North Wind gives a baby a necklace of raindrops and adds another drop each year, which increases the girl's powers; when the necklace is stolen, she goes after it and—after a circuitous search into strange territory—she gets it back with a few oldfashioned (and unfulfilling) tears. The best has the Weevils (a mock rock group?)—Zeno, Ian, Spiqueneau and Dunnoo—looking for a bed for the night, finding one (again, after an extended but not really relevant search) when an egg laid by a house with one leg(!) opens into a duplicate of its "mother," If the various elements of the story had some connection to each other, it could be Marx-brothers mayhem; this way, it's just a random series of oddities. Each of the others has an equally catchy idea but the tempos are uneven and none is consistently fluent.