Abandoned by Booklikes
Government drone by day and book lover and geek girl by night!
Currently reading
Can You Feel this?
I don't have much to say, I didn't like this short story. We focus on a woman about to have a c-section because of a condition she has. We have her thinking back on her mother and her childhood while obsessing over the imminent birth. I don't know, the whole thing just didn't work for me. I also think a few times the author wrote this as if some bad fate was about to befall all and then the ending leaves things on a hopeful note. Or maybe not hopeful, just not precarious anymore.
"Can You Feel This?" follows a woman (she stays unnamed I think through this whole thing) who suffers from placenta previa. I actually know about this a little bit cause my work wife had this and was on bed rest during the last two months of her pregnancy. So maybe I am just comparing how she handled things and this unnamed character and finding the fictional character lacking.
I also don't know if the book had been written in the first person if I would have felt more connected to the story. I wonder if Orringer wrote this in second person to put a distance between the main character and reader since the main character feels distant from her husband and child. And I think I just got fed up with it since the whole story is mostly going because of what happened to her mother when she was young this is why she is the way she is now. Which is only part of the story/things. You can choose to be different. And I think the ending was trying to telegraph that (badly).
I was initially going to read all of the short stories but decided not to. This one didn't work for me and I didn't feel like forcing myself to continue to read the rest of the collection.