THE CHOICE

A grieving woman’s desperate choice sets off a chain of mistaken identity, vengeance, and grace in Tabor’s novel.

Sarah Jane Alexander, childless despite years of treatments, is at peak fertility when her husband, Robert, is reportedly killed by a car. At the hospital, she demands that the staff harvest the body’s sperm, “just in case.” Alone in the hospital chapel, she inseminates herself and conceives soon after. Then comes the twist: The dead man was not Robert, but a notorious serial killer. The real Robert is recovering as an unidentified patient, having been beaten by the killer and left for dead in a dumpster. Sarah, it turns out, is pregnant by the would-be murderer. Urged to quietly abort, she instead “chooses life,” and the recuperating Robert (after phases of revulsion and prayer) comes to accept the boy as his own. Hovering at the story’s edges is a remorseful man who killed the killer in a botched act of vengeance. Tabor’s prose is efficient, and the plot, while improbable, is fast-paced and imaginative. The message about choosing life and redeeming evil arrives earnestly and after real debate. The author’s designation of the book as an “adult Christian novel” is a bit surprising, considering the work’s tone—the narrative dwells on insemination and pregnancy in ecstatic terms, and uneasy racial and sexual dynamics are in play (the killer fantasizes about raping Sarah only for her to later collect his sperm and impregnate herself with it). There’s an extended metaphor in which William, the mixed-race child conceived through the “Final Gift” (as the killer’s sperm is called), becomes a “toothless gift horse” rather than the hoped-for “thoroughbred”; some readers may be bothered by mother and child being appraised in stock-breeding terms.

A compelling Christian narrative with uncomfortable undertones.