DUTCH *YOUNGER SET* DREAMS

The Letter For The King : By Tonke Dragt is truly a Dutch treat for the younger set.

Since its publication more than 50 years ago, the book has sold millions of copies in Europe and been adapted as a movie; it is being developed as a series by Netflix.

This book is a fascinating exercise in exactly the poetic benefits - and limits - of the literalism that its title promises.

There may never have been a book more shallowly written, more straightforwardly imagined, with minimal unexpected turns or true surprises.

And yet the shallowness has a kind of  handcrafted sweetness.

WHETHER or not it is an admirable thing, it is certainly an arresting thing that Tonke Dragt's   ''The Letter for the King,''  newly republished in English in a translation by Laura Watkinson, has as literal a title has ever been imagined by an author for an adventurous story.

We expect the titles of children's classics to be deliberately intriguing, marked by an unexpected metaphysical juxtaposition - a witch meets a wardrobe - or at least to suggest an intriguing concept, time wrinkling or a philosopher's stone sought.

But Dragt's book promises to be about a letter, for some king, and this is exactly its chief and only matter. The question is if  it can be delivered or not.

Since its publication  more than 50 years ago, the book has sold millions of copies in Europe and been adapted as a movie; it is  being developed as series by Netflix.

So the new reader coming to it must ask not if it works but how its mechanism runs    -and, perhaps, whether  it will run well for a generation of impatient, fantasy-besotted young  English-speaking  readers.

The answer is that the book is a fascinating exercise in exactly the poetic benefits    -and limits-   of the literalism that its title promises.

The World Students Society thanks the Book Review author,  Adam Gopnik the staff writer for New Yorker and the author of two fantasies for children, ''The King in the Window'' and ''The Steps Across the Water.''