An absorbing, engaging, and finely crafted novel about the abortion debate.
Orbach (Transgressions and Other Stories, 2013) weaves a story focused on a young doctor, two women in his life, and an abortion clinic in this socially minded volume.
“It was still only the beginning of our lives,” observes Jenna early in the novel as she and her fellow residents at a Boston hospital gather to celebrate one of their birthdays. This is before Jenna’s teenage sister gets pregnant; before her friend Phil—whose commitment to helping women is described as “almost pathological”—opens a women’s health clinic in upstate New York. One of the women he helps is Adele, who comes to rely on Phil following the deaths of her parents in an accident. She tries to be supportive of Phil’s career choices, though she worries about their ramifications. Jenna, who has long harbored unrequited feelings for Phil, returns from a year in Africa to assist at the clinic, but her emotional baggage —both familial and romantic—colors her ability to function dispassionately. Set against the culture wars of the early 1990s, when anti-abortion activism often turned violent, the stories of Jenna, Phil, and Adele intersect to illustrate the difficulty of holding on to ideals in a clinical environment and a cynical world. (At one point, Phil recalls: “People ask me sometimes why I made such a point of wanting to do abortions and maybe start a clinic—and then, later, why any of us kept on, even though it meant living in a combat zone.”) Orbach is a tremendous writer, her voice effortless and her sentences as smooth as a morphine drip. She is always attuned to her characters’ feelings, even as they try to hide their emotions. Here Jenna hears from Phil that he and Adele are having a baby: “The room seemed to tilt, as if I might be spilled back into the snowy street. ‘God bless,’ I said after a moment. It would never change, then.” The issues surrounding the abortion debate are ever present, yet the book’s tone is never preachy: histrionics are for activists, while Orbach’s doctors are (almost) always focused on the task at hand. It is this dichotomy between passion and calm—between saying something and talking yourself out of it—that frames the story’s central conflict, challenging readers to feel more than they’re normally comfortable doing.
An absorbing, engaging, and finely crafted novel about the abortion debate.Pub Date: May 18, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4917-5889-2
Page Count: 322
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
PERSPECTIVES
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
