Theodore Sturgeon's masterpiece is a novel about children and childhood.

On one level it can be read as a story of child abuse. Nearly all the significant characters—Lone, Gerry Thompson, Hip Barrows, the twins, Janie, and the Kew sisters—are victims of parental abuse or neglect and of societal indifference. And there is considerable psychological insight in Sturgeon's portrayal of a character like Gerry, who grows to become a cruel and vengeful man, wanting to hurt others as he himself was hurt.

But on a deeper level, the novel participates in an age-old debate about human nature: Are people innately good or innately evil? Is the human being, as Rousseau and the Romantics claimed, originally innocent, a pure soul corrupted by the blight of society; or is the human soul itself, as Augustine and the Puritans argued, the source of a corruption against...