"This opens on a landscape so empty of familiar reference points and a culture so reduced and stylized that it might well be mistaken for Delibes' fantasy instead of the provincial Spain we've come to know through so many more sentimental novels. But it is just this presentation -- the author's unromantic way of proferring facts while withholding their context -- which makes something special of a story that could not have survived a heavier touch. It revolves around a boy named Nini who lives in a cave with his uncle/father, an opaque dawn-man called "the Ratter." They exist by hunting rats for village tables; but Nini also acts as a kind of resident oracle, having absorbed an otherwise lost tradition of farmer lore from an old man who is scorned by the others. These others, and especially the few villagers of "substance," have vested their hopes in the remote world of education, engineering, civil government, etc.; and two in particular, Justito the Mayor and an imperious bourgeoise known as "the Eleventh Commandment," devote their powers to reforming Nini and the Ratter. This despite mounting evidence that modernization is a dangerous concept in the crumbling local economy. Still, the vision is darkly equivocal and Nini, helplessly alone in his comprehension, is simply the nerve which registers a historical truism as the experience of doom. His story takes place in the hiatus between traditions which Delibes realizes via a spare, tensile, tragicomic poetry; it is essentially a modest work unlikely to claim all the attention it deserves."--Kirkus