The Innocents by Margery SharpMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Antoinette is an "innocent", a retarded child, left with an older woman in a small English town after her parents are forced back to New York at the beginning of World War II.
She does not speak but slowly says a very few words as she develops a closeness with her foster mother. After the war her mother arrives, to what she calls, "collect" the child. She has never understood her daughter to be retarded and in her social whirl, does not have time to consider it, believing that she can make necessary changes for her through speech therapy and psychoanalysis.
The foster mother is helpless to prevent the real mother from taking her, but circumstances intervene to change things in other ways.
A poignant, insightful look into how this topic was viewed in 1940's England.
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