This is a quick, one afternoon read, chronicling one woman’s childbirth experience.  Lore shows up at a Manhattan hospital alone with a multi-page birth plan.  We don’t know why she’s alone or why she has prepared such an intricate birth plan. Over the course of the next eleven hours, she connects with her nurse, Frankline, the only one who seems to understand Lore–or at least the only one who has the patience to try to understand her. Frankline is also pregnant, though no one knows yet, and she is coping with the

fear of  repeating her previous unsuccessful pregnancy and childbirth. Though the setting remains entirely in the hospital, we find out Lore’s story–her reason for arriving alone, her relationship with the father, her teenage years lost to caring for her sick mother–all while she labors.  And we find out Frankline’s story of life in Haiti and of her wish for a child. Told in third person, we see both women’s actions, their words, and also their thoughts which flashback to the past and then forward again to Lore’s current pain. This is a page-turner in a weird sort of way.  It feels like we’re in the room experiencing Lore’s childbirth along with her.

The end leaves us a bit hazy on precisely what happens, but I was okay with that. One line near the beginning of the story made me stop and reread a few times: “She (Lore) would like the surprise of children, the way they bring pieces of the outer world back to you, pieces of the past, present, and future.  The way they are always in a place where you cannot quite meet them” (31).  That last part about them always being in a place where you cannot quite meet them feels so true, and yet I never thought of it that way.