TAKE THIS CHILD

A perceptive and thoroughly appealing story of four years in a child's life, which although scrupulously avoiding sentimentality, is moving as well as discerning. Andrew, at the death of his mother, is left with his nurse and little brother to be shifted around among his various aunts when his father is recalled to Egypt. Sensitive, solitary, fanciful, Andrew is a thoroughly disconcerting child for his commonplace, blundering relatives. There is humor and minor key tragedy in this picture of the outsider in the makeshift homes of ""kind relations"". There is a delicate, underground showing-up of the adult world as the child looks upwards at it, nothing the discrepancies between theory and practice, the non-sequiturs in reasoning and conduct. Not for wide sale, perhaps, but a clever, and at the same time, very human picture of a little toy lost.