MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewThis kind of nonfiction relies on earning the privilege of entry into people’s lives and observing them closely and deeply; Hobbs excels at both. Describing environments and scenes, he is fluent and precise, with an eye for rich detail. Even better is his portrayal of the internal experiences of his subjects, showing the reader their coping mechanisms, loneliness and depression. Hobbs’s prepandemic access is formidable, as is his ability to reconstruct those scenes that occurred after in-person reporting became impossible ... Children of the State is organized into three separate “books” rather than woven together into a single narrative that might have benefited from the resulting collisions and comparisons ... He tells us a lot about an important subject...but he ends up making little of what he’s found ... In the weeks since I first read Children of the State, I have found myself considering the purpose of this kind of immersion reporting we both do, this particular genre of narrative nonfiction. I am reminded that feelings and experiences do not themselves make a book unless an author has a clear perspective on what those feelings and experiences mean, why it’s important to the reader — and what an author has learned.
Christa Parravani
PositiveNew York Times Review of BooksParravani never lets us feel that a news item is anything less than terrifyingly, corporeally personal ... Frustratingly, the book feels as if it was rushed through in the midst of one. Evocative passages of language and story, lucid in context and nuance, slam the brakes at potholes in the narrative. Too many phrases are self-consciously poetic and tangled. At times, I wanted to pour Parravani a cup of tea or a third-trimester glass of wine and ask what she means, to tease out deeper analysis from the layers of emotion disguising it, dressing up half-thoughts in literary flourishes, or tossing a silk scarf of vanity over all she has so valuably bared ... But in the end, what she has to tell us, and what she is capable of making us feel, outweighs my irritation. What she has done is dissect the complexity of choice, how our own trauma and relationships inform it, as well as policy and access. She reveals the cost to us all when we fail to openly personalize the politics of abortion in America.
