Customer Reviews

Other Women's Children

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3 star:		(1)
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Klass is the type of writer who has grown by word of mouth, from reader to reader, across the country. Her novels show that rarest of combinations -- a sensitivity to the finest nuances of people's lives, a fine ear for pacing and dialog and, best of all, a great story. She writes with compassion for the human condition, unfettered by either sentimentality or superficiality. Although her books are hard to put down, they are even harder to forget.

Amelia is a female pediatrician dealing with the reality of her home life - a husband and son, both loving and healthy - and the reality of the sadness of dying children that she encounters daily in her work. It is difficult of her to reconcile these two aspects of her life.

"You can't focus on the dying children. If you use dying children to draw up a scale of relative
importance, then all the healthy children end up bunched together at one insignificant end.
That won't keep them healthy. You can't protect them, you can't make deals - you may focus
on the sick, but that doesn't guarantee continued health to the one you are ignoring.

But that still doesn't show you how to stretch your life so that both kinds of importance
can be successfully accommodated". (p.278)

How Amelia learns to balance the different parts of her life and her attempts to become a more present wife and mother, make for a very moving and poignant book.

Other Women's Children is fantastic, as are all Perri Klass' writings. She's a great pediatrician and a fabulous writer.

This is a story about a woman who is torn between her responsibilities as a mother and wife and as a doctor. She witnesses tragedy and pain, and superstitiously believes that if she tries really hard to fix all that, her son would be spared. She becomes so immersed in this belief that eventually her marriage falls apart and her family fragments. This book is successful in explaining how highly intelligent and educated people can make horrible decisions based on nothingness. I think Perri Klass does a very good job portraying the love that a mother feels for her child. In many instances the main character is caught relishing on her beautiful son, and her love is expressed in many sweet ways. The plot is interesting, not a page-turner, but this is nonetheless a good book to take along in a long flight, or to read by the pool.