Customer Reviews

Baby's Breath

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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.'"

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.

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.

One is not quite sure where one is being led at first, but once the story begins to unfold, there is no way to escape. This is a serious issue dealt with in a sensitive and often poetic way.

Upon reading this book, I found myself reflecting on the rearing of my own son. Would my son be capable of duplicity in his relationship with a young woman? Would he be capable of helping and doing the right thing? I had many thoughts of my role in his upbringing....did I do a good job - what could I have done better? Did he have issues which were not dealt with either at all or in part? As a mother, my heart broke for both Leah and Allysa. Having lost a baby of my own at birth, I cried as I read of the birth and all that Allysa went through.

I also hope that this book may become a useful tool in the necessary change our society must undergo to prevent the infanticide as well as preventing our young women from going through Allie's nightmare. Allie might make a recovery with all the help of her family and therapists, but what of those young women who do not have any family support? What of those young women who will remained so scarred and mutilated mentally and physically that recovery is all but impossible?

I would like to see this book covered by Oprah and her book club? Then perhaps the problem would be brought to the attention of the nation. I am but one lone voice and would like to see millions of people reading this book and then acting upon this sad situation.

As an avid reader, a 20 year old daughter of a single mother, and a womyn's studies major, I rarely find fiction that I relate to specifically and strongly. There are three ways in which this book touched me immensely. The first thing that choked my throat was simply the relationship between mother and daughter. I've often encountered the prejudices from christian suburbanites and nuclear families because I was raised without a father. Rarely in our popular media does one find a true, unsteriotypical portrayal of the strong bond between a family like this of two womyn. The love spiked with intense pain resonates from both characters with such reality that by the second chapter I was crying simply from reading my experiences in someone else's voice. The tragedy of adulthood, the separation angst of moving to college, and the deliberate severing of emotional ties in trying to be an individual are all experiences many of us go through and usually don't talk about. The second thing that I reacted to is the natural mix of confusion, animosity, and conformity that most young womyn, especially once in college or out of the houses we were raised in experience. Without the emotional backbone of parents and family, in a new place, 'fitting in' is an emotional, physical, and spiritual struggle. Having problems with weight, not being blonde or rich, and not knowing one's social 'place' leads some to finding themselves, and others to try and create the self others want them to be. This tying in to the third and most poignant point. Pregnancy. Mass media has been depicting for years the number of cases where newborns are found dead or dying, abandoned after birth. How easy it was, then, to look and judge this as the most heinous crime of humanity. Though we have no problem blaming most murders on insanity, when a girl abandons her child the media depict the lowest form of evil. This book delves into the unexpressed psychosis of the mind behind the act. Striving to fit into society, please parents and friends, and finding her sexual self, our heroine does find herself in one of the darkest places imaginable, yet there is a new light shed on the circumstances. This book is not only a movement in the way of womyn, it is also a perfect and painfully beautiful portrayal of two womyn's minds in the mix of contemporary society's rules and regulations. I thank Anna Villegas and Lynne Hugo for taking this risk and great step forward.

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