SOURCE: "Overcoming a Loveless Childhood," in The New York Times, 6 April 1989, p. C17.

Since 1977, Rich has been the chief cinema and television critic for Time magazine. He is also a contributor to Ms., the New York Times, and Esquire. In the following review of the 1989 Circle Repertory Company's production of Amulets against the Dragon Force, Rich comments on the anguish in the characters' lives and finds Zindel's plot and use of mythology overworked

While most of François Truffaut's Small Change has receded in memory, I can't imagine forgetting the scene in which a baby tumbles from a high apartment-house window and survives. Truffaut made an indelible image out of profound questions that had defined his career from The 400 Blows and that never leave most of us: By what miracle do some children survive? What happens to those victims of cruel, lonely, loveless childhoods who do grow up...