Baby's Breath [Hardcover]

Anna Tuttle Villegas (Author), Lynne Hugo (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 27, 2000

What does unconditional love mean? Baby's Breath is a groundbreaking novel about a mother-daughter relationship shattered by a crime so horrific that even in our jaded culture few speak of it without an involuntary shudder. None of us thinks it could happen in our family. Leah Pacey, however, is not allowed the luxury of such denial. For her, the only notion more unthinkable than Alyssa's act is that of abandoning her daughter.

Leah's search for understanding is as halting as our own. She persists only because she must.

As we all must.

Baby's Breath is an unprecedented story of human suffering and human redemption. Sometimes art takes us where we have not imagined, where we do not go of our own accord, and in doing so becomes an instrument of social change. In this meticulously researched work, Hugo and Villegas patiently open our hearts to see beyond the surface of one girl, beyond the surface of sensational headlines. Important literature is rarely easy and this novel is no exception.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A mother-daughter relationship is severely tested in this chilling novel about infanticide by the authors of Swimming Lessons. Single mother Leah Pacey misses her daughter, Alyssa ("Allie"), when Allie goes off to college in Berkeley. But she feels a new lease on life, too, and gives up her real estate job in Philadelphia to paint full-time. Meanwhile, Allie is undergoing a very different transformation. After a brief, fumbling fling, she discovers she is pregnant, but fails to fully acknowledge her condition, even to herself. It is clear from the beginning that there is something very wrong with this reclusive honors student. She sleeps for 12 to 14 hours at a stretch, is adamant about never returning to Philly (although she does end up going home for a brief Thanksgiving visit) and moves into her own apartment but doesn't leave a forwarding address. Allie carries her secret pregnancy to full term and delivers her baby in a BART subway station; then, in a state of delirium, she checks into a filthy rooming house. When Allie's kindly neighbor notices that Allie is missing, she contacts Leah. Allie is arrested when she returns to the BART station where she left her baby, who has since been found dead, and Allie is charged with murder. Leah's and Allie's stories are told in counterpoint, as the novel builds up to the climactic trial scenes. The novel's two central voices are so seamlessly interwoven, one would never suspect that the authors created this moving and disturbing novel via long distance correspondence. The poignancy they achieve allows the reader to overlook an occasional lapse into clich? and stereotype. (Sept.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

A vividly detailed but unpersuasive second novel tries to show why a college freshman denies her pregnancy and then abandons her newborn baby.The writers' territory is that perimeter around A-student Alyssa, 19, and her middle-aged mother Leah, a successful painter, bristling with defense mechanisms and hurt-seeking missiles that surrounds the hearts of so many mothers and daughters in fiction. Leah has long been divorced from Dennis, a self-absorbed artist whose remarriage to a much younger woman has left money as his only link to his daughter, who lives with Leah in Philadelphia. Alyssa is bright and does well in school, but when Leah, who is nursing her dying mother, can't fly out with her when she leaves for her freshman year at Berkeley, Alyssa is deeply hurt. Seeing this abandonment as yet another example of her mother's insensitivity, and already pudgy, she keeps eating, loses her virginity to a campus stud, and then finds herself pregnant. Because the plot demands that she behave in moronic ways and keep mum with Mom, who is sweet and nice and really tries, Alyssa tells nobody. Instead, she moves out of her dorm, lives alone and, when labor starts, heads to a subway restroom, where she gives birth to a baby girl. Disoriented by shock and pain, Alyssa is rescued by a street woman, who gives her temporary shelter in a flophouse in San Francisco's Tenderloin district. But when the baby's body is found in a trashcan, Alyssa is arrested and thrown into the slammer without bail. It's not until Alyssa's trial for murder that she finally begins to draw closer to her distraught mother.What should be a searing tragedy is instead another unconvincing take on mothers and daughters who love each other but are too dumb and defensive to open up until it's almost too late. -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 376 pages
• Publisher: Synergistic Pr; 1st edition (September 27, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0912184132
• ISBN-13: 978-0912184135
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.9 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,428,438 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Lynne Hugo is an American author whose roots are in the northeast. She lives with her husband, the academic vice president of a liberal arts college, in the Midwest. They have two grown children, two grandchildren, and a chocolate Labrador retriever. A National Endowment For The Arts Fellowship recipient, she has also received repeat individual artists grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and the Ohio Arts Council. Her publications include five novels, one volume of creative non-fiction, two books of poetry and a children's book.

Ms. Hugo has taught creative writing to hundreds of schoolchildren through the Ohio Arts Council's renowned Arts in Education program. She holds a Bachelor's degree from Connecticut College, and a Master's from Miami University.

When an editor asked her to describe herself as a writer, she responded:

"I write in black Wal-Mart capri sweatpants. They don't start out as capris, but I routinely shrink them in the drier by accident. And I always buy black because it doesn't show where I've wiped the chocolate off my hands. Now that my son and daughter are grown, my previous high grade of 'below average' in Domestic Achievement has dropped somewhat. But I'm less guilty about it now. I lose myself in crafting language by a window with birdfeeders hanging in the branches of a Chinese elm towering over the house. When I come up for air, I hike by the ponds and along the river in a nearby forest with my beloved Lab. My husband, with whom I planted that elm as a bare root sapling, joins us when he can."

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Baby's Breath: Exploring the Mother-Daughter Bond, September 29, 2000

By 

Elizabeth B. Barkley "Annie Bananie" (Cincinnati, Ohio USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Baby's Breath (Hardcover)

By now most readers probably know that Baby's Breath is about neonaticide. Grappling with that issue-in reality or in fiction-can never be a simple, black and white experience. To their credit, as writers and as mothers, Lynne Hugo and Anna Tuttle Villegas, never pretend it is. That's what makes this book, their second collaboration, so satisfying to read. They approach their subject from a multiplicity of perspectives: as mothers, as literary artists, as women trying to fathom how anyone would abandon a baby at birth.

When Hugo and Villegas began exploring the issue of neonaticide as a theme for their work, they found few writers before them who had been willing to tackle what seemed a taboo topic. The more they delved, the more resources they found to help them understand this phenomenon. The list of 25 works consulted at the end of the novel includes news reports of young mothers abandoning their children, explorations of postpartum depression and personality abnormalities, and court briefs and trial transcripts detailing cases paralleling Alyssa's in Baby's Breath. Clearly the authors have done their homework. But good research does not necessarily make a good novel. What the authors bring to this work is what made their first novel, Swimming Lessons, so compelling: insight into life and relationships and a literary style that keeps the reader engaged in a book dealing with a subject difficult to face.

In the early pages of the book we are introduced to Alyssa, a college freshman at Berkeley, who has gone to college about as far away as she can from her father and her mother, Leah, divorced in Philadelphia. The opening chapters, where we are given background on Alyssa's childhood and her parents' divorce, moved a little slowly for me, but being a fan of Swimming Lessons, I knew these pages were a necessary prelude to what Hugo and Villegas shine at: seamless, literary writing. I wasn't disappointed.

From two perspectives, daughter and mother miles apart, we watch as Alyssa sinks into isolation and denial, and Leah begins to find herself as she buries a failed marriage and is re-born as a successful artist. It is in the middle chapters, when we begin to understand what Alyssa has done-abandoned her baby in a public restroom-that we, along with Allie and Leah, begin the journey to understand "why."

This is not only Alyssa's story, it is also Leah's-the mother who, when she arrives in California, initially denies her daughter's act because admitting it would mean admitting a less-than-perfect mother-daughter relationship. It is Allie's neighbor Clara, a mother herself, who gently helps Leah begin to understand that Allie could be guilty of the crime, because, although Leah was unaware of it, Alyssa really had been pregnant.

"Clara, she'd have come to me"-Leah's defensive response is the beginning of a deeper relationship between mother and daughter that is as much the subject of the book as the baby's abandonment.

Through therapy sessions in prison where Alyssa comes to grips with her past and her self, through court testimony, and through Clara, friend now to both mother and daughter, Alyssa and Leah grow to understand not only what happened and possibly why it happened but also how precious the mother-daughter bond is. On an opening page of this book, Hugo and Villegas write: "Belief is the lifeblood of love," dedicating the novel to their mothers "who gave us theirs" and to their children "to whom we give ours." In the final pages of the book, as we listen to the verdict of the jury sitting in judgment on Alyssa's actions, we hear Hugo's and Villegas' dedication translated to the lives of another mother and daughter. In Leah's words to Allie we see that out of suffering can come redemption and that belief and love are inseparable: "'We'll make it, Allie. We'll make it.'"

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Baby's Breath, December 10, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Baby's Breath (Hardcover)

Calling all book clubs! Members of my book club have each had favorites or disappointments among the titles we've read. The only one that got unanimous approval, for being both a good read and great discussion, was Baby's Breath. A poignant, moving, sometimes disturbing novel about the tragedy of infanticide (epidemic in the U.S. and abroad), Baby's Breath has underlying themes of redemption. It's painful at times, but it shows how fiction can have potential as an instrument of social change.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Baby's Breath, February 10, 2001

By 

Barb Eshbaugh (Oxford, OH USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Baby's Breath (Hardcover)

A compelling, believable novel covering a subject seen widely in newsmedia but seldom in jounalism. I could not put the book down and wept in sympathy for the confused woman who makes a poor choice. It is a study of mother/daughter unconditional love which is tested to the ultimate degree. Should be a book required for Women's Issues Courses in colleges and universities.