One day, you wake up to discover your parents and your younger sister have disappeared. The only reason you are still alive is because the soldiers who took your family didn't know that your bedroom was behind a wall in your home. This is the plight of twelve-year-old Alex, of Felice Holman's book The Wild Children, set during the Russian Revolution of 1917. .

             Alex has nowhere to go. His teacher is afraid to help him. His uncle is gone, too. So Alex becomes one of the wild children, orphaned boys who roam the streets and survive by stealing and committing other petty crimes. Alex stays in a cellar with a band of homeless boys, including Misha, Peter, Boris and Grigoriy. He needs stay with these other orphaned children for protection as well as food.

             Because the winter is so cold, the boys try to escape to a warmer part of the country on a train. There, they meet a girl named Anya who also joins their number. But they are discovered on the train and sent to an orphanage. Peter tells Alex that many boys have been committed to orphanages before, and they can escape. The head of he orphanage the boys are sent to are cruel, but the boys, through togetherness, eventually weather the difficulties life has dealt them.

             The Wild Children does not have a entirely happy ending. All of the boys do not find homes, and Russia is still under the hand of a cruel leader. However, the book shows that through togetherness, survival is possible. The determination of Peter, Alex, and Misha to help one another survive under difficult circumstances, as if the boys were a family, even though the boys' real parents are gone, saves them from the horrors of the Russian streets, the cold winter and the worst abuses of a Russian orphanage. .