I SHOULD WORRY, I SHOULD CARE

Why did we have to move?"" Molly knows all the reasons, knows she's only irritating her mother again, knows she's being pigheaded--but in this story of Brooklyn between the Depresson and the War, the complex realities aren't confined to external circumstances. Take ""my friend Lynn"": Molly doesn't really know her yet, they've just waved across the courtyard, and her name isn't really Lynn (""Where did she get such a fancy name?"" brother Joey has astutely asked) but, it turns out, Celia; in fact, Molly doesn't even like her--she merely wants, unmoored as she is, to claim someone for a friend. By the book's end she's glad to see Celia move away, having found good and true friends in Julie, whose mother makes selfish demands, and quiet Norma, whose mother is strict. All this redounds, partly, to the credit of Molly's sane and sensible household, where early frictions are dissolved by later jokes; and where, in the after-dinner glow, Molly can contemplate the unthinkable--why, listening to news of the Holocaust, ""couldn't the President of the United States stop Hitler? Why couldn't he help the Jews? Why couldn't God?"" The title refers to the good feeling Molly gets from meeting a boy--a Jewish boy--who, for once, ""talks to her as if she were a real person,"" But it also reflects the oscillation between the natural depths and heights of childhood that the book puts across with spirited ease.