A Master Plan for Rescue / Janis Cooke Newman 322 pp.

12-year-old Jack is listening to the radio in his New York apartment on a quiet December Sunday in 1941 when suddenly his vision blurs and he fears the world will never be the same. Through his new thick glasses he navigates the schoolyard and the city streets after he loses the person he loves most, and with the help of his code-a-graph and a Jewish refugee named Jakob, concocts a plan to set the world right again. Full of period detail - the Lower East Side, the radio, the colorful intersection of ethnic groups - that is overused to the point of unreadability, Newman even includes my favorite feeble chestnut, the malign Catholic priest. Occasionally suspenseful and moving but ultimately forgettable.