Eleven Hours

By: Pamela Erens

Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell

• An NPR Best Book of 2016
  
• A New Yorker Book We Loved in 2016
• Named to Kirkus Reviews' Best Books of 2016
• The Millions Most Anticipated Book of 2016
• Flavorwire Most Anticipated Book

From the critically acclaimed author of The Virgins, Eleven Hours is an intimate exploration of the physical and mental challenges of childbirth, told with unremitting suspense and astonishing beauty.

Lore arrives at the hospital alone—no husband, no partner, no friends. Her birth plan is explicit: she wants no fetal monitor, no IV, no epidural. Franckline, a nurse in the maternity ward—herself on the verge of showing—is patient with the young woman. She knows what it’s like to worry that something might go wrong, and she understands the distress when it does. She knows as well as anyone the severe challenge of childbirth, what it does to the mind and the body.

Eleven Hours is the story of two soon-to-be mothers who, in the midst of a difficult labor, are forced to reckon with their pasts and re-create their futures. Lore must disentangle herself from a love triangle; Franckline must move beyond past traumas to accept the life that’s waiting for her. Pamela Erens moves seamlessly between their begrudging partnership and the memories evoked by so intense an experience: for Lore, of the father of her child and her former best friend; for Franckline, of the family in Haiti from which she’s exiled. At turns urgent and lyrical, Erens’s novel is a visceral portrait of childbirth, and a vivid rendering of the way we approach motherhood—with fear and joy, anguish and awe.

Interesting read! Doesn’t feel finished.

Interesting read - exploring unique relationship dynamics between lovers, friends, and strangers will also taking a look at the less perfect side of modern childbirth (very different from how it’s depicted in movies). I struggled a bit with the resolution at the end… almost as if the author ended the novel before the story was done.

Ending??

So good throughout but then ends abruptly. Maybe just me but I would have liked just a hint to which direction the characters went. Still, quite good!

Fabulously read, beautifully written, moving . I

read it and listened to it twice . I highly recommend it, a really deeply good book.