Women's Fiction, Family & Friendship - Fiction, Jewish Fiction & Literature

Daybreak

Name: Daybreak
Author: Belva Plain
ISBN: 9780440216810

by Belva Plain

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Overview

The doctor's office is cool, white, sterile. But the doctor's words are searing: blood tests prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Margaret and Arthur Crawfield's beloved, dying son is not their child. Now they must face Peter's death and the shock of having a son they have never met. Grieving, yet compelled, they begin a search that will tear two families apart.

Laura and "Bud" Rice share an elegant home and two children, brilliant, handsome Tom, and cherished, chronically ill eleven-year-old Timmy. But after nineteen years of marriage, Laura's respectable husband is a stranger—and the reason for Tom's escalating involvement with a group of campus bigots. Suddenly the Crawfields enter their lives and shatter their fragile world. As the Rices' quiet Southern town explodes with hate and violence, the two familes must embrace—or be destroyed by—the shattering truth.

Caring for their dying son, the Crawfield's have gained strength and closeness. But nothing prepares them for the news that blood tests prove their son is not their biological child. The Rice's live a peaceful life--until the Crawfield's enter. As explosive emotions collide, the two families must embrace the shattering truth to survive.

Synopsis

Publishers Weekly

A Southern couple struggles with the impending death of their son. (Apr.)

About the Author, Belva Plain

Known for her dramatic love epics with vivid characterizations Belva Plain first entranced readers back in 1979 with the made-for-miniseries romance, Evergreen.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

A Southern couple struggles with the impending death of their son. (Apr.)

Stuart Whitwell

To be charitable, you don't really think about how weak everything in this book is until you've finished zipping through it at about 150 mph. It is then, when you sit back to ponder its you'd-better-not-be-anti-Semitic-because-you-might-be-Jewish-too message and your mind flashes back to the countless TV movies that treated with equal sensitivity and superficiality the burning issues of our day (rape, child-parent relationships, fatal diseases, prejudice, etc.), that you begin to wonder what the "superficial" aspect of this formula means. Does it mean, for instance, that the issue is being exploited for some other purpose? Does it mean that we, the readers or TV viewers, handle these issues better when we're not called on to actually "think"? Anyway, something like that seems to be going on in this story of Tom, the nice young man who grows up to be a bigot like his dad and even becomes, through his girlfriend, an ardent follower of a David Duke-style politician. What he doesn't know--at first--is that he was swapped at birth with a boy who dies of cystic fibrosis (on about page two of the novel) and that he is really Jewish. Fortunately, we know he's soft-hearted like his piano-teaching mother because he's so kind to his younger "brother," who also has cystic fibrosis. Tom's reaction to discovering the truth is self-hatred and denial until his girlfriend, a true anti-Semite, finds out, and then Tom becomes sensitive again. Tom's nazi father is, by the way, the cause of all this cystic fibrosis (irony of ironies), and is, of course, Southern. Tom's real, Jewish parents are intellectual and rich, his dreamy, piano-playing "mother" is destined to find a man as kindhearted as she. La, la, la; very predictable, pretty dumb.