Paula Fox has earned a deserved reputation as one of America's most outstanding writers for children. Critics and reviewers have praised her capacity to capture the intense emotions and perceptions of young characters, her willingness to explore complex, even tragic, themes and moral issues, her ability to create psychologically realistic characters and vividly realized settings in graceful, even at times poetic, prose. Fox's use of under-statement, her ability to evoke significance and to suggest emotional emphases and symbolic resonances through carefully selected details and precisely employed figurative language are among her many achievements as a writer. In addition to the fourteen books she has written for children, Fox has also written five novels for adults, one of which, Desperate Characters (1970), has already been acclaimed an American masterpiece among short novels by such eminent critics as Irving Howe and Alfred Kazin.

The daughter of writer Paul Harvey Fox and...