title: The Cradle: A Novel
author:  Patrick Somerville 
description: An elusive heirloom cradle symbolizes childhood's pains and possibilities in Somerville's spare, elegant first novel (after a story collection, <i>Trouble</i>). Marissa, pregnant with her first child, becomes obsessed with tracking down the antique cradle her mother took when she abandoned the family a decade earlier. Marissa's husband, Matt, is sure he's been dispatched on a fool's errand, but his journey soon connects him to Marissa's family and his own history of abandonment, neglect and abuse amid a string of foster homes and orphanages. Matt's quest through four states is interwoven with another drama that takes place 11 years later, in 2008, in which poet and children's author Renee Owen is haunted by memories of war and a lost love as she prepares to send her son off to fight in Iraq. Again, long-buried secrets come to the surface, one of which poignantly links the two story lines. Though the connection will not shock, Somerville's themes of a broader sense of interconnectivity and the resultant miracles of everyday existence retain their strength and affirm the value of forming and keeping families. <i>(Mar.)</i> <br />Copyright  Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
zlib_text: Cradle and All
  
  Cradle and All
  Cradle and All
  
  Cradle and All
  
  Chapter 1
  SUNDOWN HAD BLOODIED THE HORIZON over the uneven rooftops of South Boston. Birds
  were perched on every roof and seemed to be watching the girl walking slowly below
  Kathleen Beavier made her way down a shadowy side street that was as alien to her as the
  faraway surface of the moon. Actually, she was here in Southie because it was so frozen, so obscure
  to her. She had on a fatigue jacket, long patterned skirt, and black combat-style boots - the urban
  streetwear look. The boots rubbed raw circles into her heels, but she welcomed the pain. It was a
  distraction from the unthinkable thing she had come to do.
  This is so spooky, so unreal, so impossible, she thought.
  The sixteen-year-old girl paused to catch her breath at the sparsely trafficked intersection of
  Dorchester and Broadway. She didn’t look as if she belonged here. She was too preppy, maybe too
  pretty. That was her plan, though. She’d never bump into anyone she