The Stone Children opens at the end of World War ll in Germany. Uriel, a young soldier among those liberating Buchenwald Concentration Camp, sees not only the horrors but also sees images of butterflies, the symbol of transformation, drawn on the floors and walls of the barracks by children who had been imprisoned there. He learns that these images are in every camp and is deeply effected. When the war in the Pacific ends Uriel returns to his Cape Cod village, marries his childhood sweetheart Marra and begins his career as a children's book illustrator. Their home is filled with love but Uriel's nights are tortured by nightmares of the horrors he witnessed at Buchenwald. Marra, a sculptor, also begins to dream. She dreams of eggs. She dreams of children: Eggs, at first. Her dreams swam with the images of smooth-shelled eggs: brown, white, blue, speckled. From deep within the eggs came songs as if their interiors held choirs. She felt the sound in her belly like something growing inside her, something that wanted to be born into the world. A force had entered Uriel at Buchenwald, a something that wants to be known. It wants to communicate through him and Marra, guiding their art and bearing a healing message for all humanity. It wants to prepare the world for the children to come, the Lumins, the compassionate children who had died in the Holocaust. This story takes the reader from World War ll through all the years that followed up to the infamous morning of September 11, 2001. Intertwined amid the turmoil and confusion of those years are wonders and changes that raise humanity's awareness. "There is a noble fragment within us, a kind of beginning, a small secret...coiled love in fluid stone."
