THE CHILDREN'S HOUR.('Child of My Heart')(Book Review)

Reading Alice McDermott's new novel, "Child of My Heart" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $23), we know that a child is going to die--the book is strewn with omens--but we don't know which one. Could it be Theresa? She is our narrator, looking back on a summer she spent, as she tells us in her opening sentence, taking care of "four dogs, three cats, the Moran kids; Daisy, my eight-year-old cousin; and Flora, the toddler child of a local artist." The time is the sixties; the place is the North Shore of Long Island. In the story, Theresa is fifteen, nubile, and precocious. "Send me great love from somewhere, else I shall die," she says, quoting Eustacia Vye. (She is reading "The ...