Customer Reviews

Tears in a Bottle

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book must have been very difficult for Sylvia Bambola to write. In this book, teenage Becky ends up pregnant, and everybody persuades her to have an abortion. Through the grief of losing her baby, Becky hooks up with Maggie, who helps her along the healing process.

This book gives all the brutal facts about abortion and the clinics. You don't hear a lot of this stuff in the media. Bambola talks about the devastating effects that abortion has on girls, such as the emotional trauma, inability to have children, sometimes even death.

Bambola also deals with abortion from several perspectives. She talks about the short term effects and the long term effects that girls suffer through after aborting their babies. She talks about how abortion clinics are really run. She talks about the abortion doctors and what some of them go through, and how they just shut themselves off to cope with the reality of what they are doing. She even talks about the impact of what the abortion doctors do and how it effects their families.

This is a great overview of abortion in fiction form. Atonement Child by Francine Rivers and Won By Love by Norma McCorvey are also good.

In Tears in A Bottle, Sylvia Bambola takes on the difficult and controversial subject of abortion and delivers a riveting story that deals with the deep emotion and challenges that the decision to abort a pregnancy imparts on the lives and families of women in America. Bambola weaves several compelling storylines that bring to life the physical, emotional and spiritual difficulties that often follow an abortion. The author is ambitious in her scope of covering the many sides of abortion, but she consistently delivers in terms of attention to detail as well as with an entertaining, if challenging story. Tears in A Bottle asks the reader to consider the effect of abortion on society and individuals lives and provides an uplifting solution for those struggling with their decision to abort their pregnancy.

For another excellent novel from Bambola, check out A Refiner's Fire.

I have been in ministry to post-abortive women for several years, and still, Ms. Bambola's book took my breath away. From the first page the author captured my attention and for the first time in my life I read a novel from cover to cover in one sitting. I literally could not put it down. Never before have I seen such an all-encompassing, sensitive, true-to-life look into virtually every facet of this complex, delicate, and utterly divisive subject. I applaud Ms. Bambola for creating a safe, honest, non-exploitative look into the world of abortion and to all the ways it affects the lives of those touched by it. Whatever your opinion of abortion, this book is a must-read.

If you really want to know the ins and outs of the whole abortion industry and the personal ramifications of those who have experienced abortion, I highly recommend this book. While it is a work of fiction, the story could be on of many I have witnessed personally through my work as Executive Director of The Pregnancy Resource Center in my city. We offer abortion recovery because there are statistics to support the statement, "45% of women 50 and under in our country have experienced abortion at least once." These stats were released through the Guttmacher Institute, the record keeper for Planned Parenthood. Frankly, we know they low ball stats such as these. Think about this-the over 35 MILLION women who have experienced abortion since it became legal in 1973 does not include even half the people who are walking wounded in our society. I know of 3 abortion in my immediate and fragmented family. All the brokenness is directly a result of an abortion.

This book is an explanation about the broken people we meet every day and wonder why.For those who think the part about the abortion clinics extreme, do some research. With regularity, I see ER vehicles drive by my clinic to our neighbor Planned Parenthood to pick up another injured woman. There are some abortionists as despicable as those created for this book, and others who ended up trapped to make a living and feel there is no way out.

Really, the names and places might have been changed, but this story is about as real as you're going to get.

Another book about the history of the whole abortion issue I'd like to recommend is Compelling Interests by Jessica Shaver Renshaw. It to tells the truth through a fictional account. This is an area where no one can afford to remain ignorant or silent. One day one of our daughters or granddaughters may be in Becky's position. My prayer is we will all have the resources needed to help turn a tragic situation in to one of hope and healing.

While Tears in a Bottle delves deep into the controversial issue of abortion, its focus on the emotional and spiritual issues these girls face is what really makes the book memorable. More than just a novel, this book really stays with you and forces the reader to examine society's views on unwanted pregnancy.

I was really looking forward to reading this book because it was supposed to deal with the emotional aftermath of an extremely difficult issue (abortion more so than the clinic shooting) faced by a young girl with an unwanted pregnancy. Rather than discussng this topic in a meaningful way, the book spiraled down into extreme pro-life propoganda and ended up sounding completely ridiculous. Basically, the basis of the book consists of the following: Abortion doctors are alcoholics, operate on their patients while drunk, and molest their patients because the patients "don't have any virtue left anyway." Abortion clinic owners get filthy rich from running abortion clinics and abuse their spouses. Abortion clinics purposely make women wait to have abortions until the fetus is more developed (even if the woman wants the abortion right away in the first trimester) so the clinic can sell fetus body parts and make more money. The state health regulators let abortion clinics do whatever they want and ignore any applicable health regulations. The pro-life advocates, who are all perfect angels, are really the ones who get threatened and harassed and are being unfairly blamed for threats to abortion clinics. In fact, the shooting at the abortion clinic in this story was really masterminded by the abortion clinic owner to get rid of the drunk doctor. This book was SO extreme - and is admittedly a story of fiction - yet continued to set forth certain scenarios and statistics as "truth." I found it embarassing and the prose was not written particularly well. It does not contribute to the abortion debate in any meaningful way. I am going to see if I can return this book to Amazon. I wanted to give it no stars but Amazon makes you have a minimum of one star.