PositiveThe New York Time Book ReviewThis book addresses all those experiences, truly a breathtaking roundup of the many ways that women carry and lose babies and pregnancies, so many possible and impossible choices to be made, so many capitulations and coercions to be endured. All the narratives in the novel make clear that the only thing that makes any of it bearable is the agency each woman can claim ... The author is a therapist, and reading this book is not unlike eavesdropping on someone else’s session .. Anna is a careful observer of other women — we know this because in yoga class she notices that Corrie’s toenails are unpainted and her yoga clothes are cheap. But these details feel a bit cheap themselves. Corrie is impoverished and her story is appalling and sad, but her problems are never resolved or explored because she gets only a one-episode arc. Does her story matter or not? With women living under the specter of disappearing reproductive rights — yes, her story matters: It is worth hearing and reading. From the perspective of the main character, Corrie’s is one of many stories Anna uses to sort and make meaning of her own life ... I am right there with her, ravenous for women’s accounts, for our histories, portraits and perspectives. Right now these stories are crucial. I will listen to them all, even if this particular novel reads as unsettlingly uncertain about whose story it is — the protagonist’s or the supporting characters’. Whether or not this book brings together their voices harmoniously, it does clarify and reiterate that precious little stands between women and reproductive bondage, and our stories — these lived narratives overheard, whispered, written into novels — continue to show that we have lives worth living, that women are viable human beings.
