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THE CRADLE WILL FALL by Stephen Seley Kirkus Star

THE CRADLE WILL FALL

By

Publisher: Harcourt, Brace

A perceptive, poignant first novel, as the impact of death is reflected through the violent, volatile emotions of a small boy, 10-year old Simon Barbor. Here in a New Jersey, Jewish suburban community is the coarse, comfortable world of his gutteral grandmother, his uncles and aunts, his father whose nose was too big, Georgie whom he teased and bullied, and the soft, sad mother whom he loved inexpressibly -- and whose prescience of death shadowed the weeks before her illness. Here too is Simon's own world, the fears, the lonely waking dreams, the hopes and humiliations, the hates...and after his mother's death, the terror and guilt, the self-importance and self-pity, and final heartbreak, as his father, in a moment of hysteria, accuses Simon of his mother's death...A not readily forgotten fragment of childhood.