Can You Feel This? by Julie Orringer ~ Book Review

Book Description:

In the chaos of a maternity ward, memories of tragedy and grief come flooding back for an anxious mother-to-be as she struggles to balance her child’s needs with her own healing.

Rushed into an emergency cesarean section, a woman finds herself in the same hospital where her suicidal mother died. She’s buried the trauma of her mother’s last hours—and also the dread that she might be just as vulnerable to breaking. As the new mother relives one crisis in the midst of another, prize-winning author Julie Orringer turns the joyous event of birth into a harrowing, poignant short story.

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About the Author:

Julie Orringer is an American author born in Miami, Florida. Her first book, How to Breathe Underwater, was published in September 2003 by Knopf Publishing Group. She is a graduate of Cornell University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Her stories have appeared in The Paris Review, McSweeney's, Ploughshares, Zoetrope: All-Story, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Best New American Voices, and The Best American Non-Required Reading. She received the Paris Review's Discovery Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, The Yale Review Editors' Prize, Ploughshares' Cohen Award, the Northern California Book Award, and the Anne and Robert Cowan Award from the Jewish Community Endowment Fund. She was the recipient of a 2004-5 NEA grant for her current project, a novel set in Budapest and Paris before and during the Second World War.

Author's Website.

Review:

Another great short story in the Inheritance collection. This one was written in the second person. A women is rushed to the hospital to deliver her first baby after being diagnosed with placenta previa. The same hospital her mother was brought to after she committed suicide when she was just a child.

It is hard to say too much without giving this short story away but I really enjoyed the writing style and having it written in second person. I was definitely felt the pain, fear, exhaustion and love while reading this short, right from page one until the end.

I give this a 4 out of 5 stars.