Book
The risk of us / Rachel Howard.
What is the cost of motherhood? When The Risk of Us opens, we meet a forty-something woman who deeply wants to become a mother. The path that opens up to her and her husband takes them through the foster care system, with the goal of adoption. And when seven-year-old Maresa comes into their lives, with her inch-deep dimples and a voice that can beam to the moon, their hearts fill with love. But her rages and troubles threaten to crack open their marriage. Over the course of a year, as Maresa approaches the age at which children become nearly impossible to place, the couple must decide if they can be the parents this child needs, and finalize the adoption - or, almost unthinkably, give her up.
Record details
- ISBN: 9781328588821
- ISBN: 1328588823
- Physical Description: 200 pages ; 22 cm
- Publisher: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019.
- Copyright: ©2019.
Content descriptions
| Bibliography, etc. Note: | Includes bibliographical references. |
Search for related items by subject
| Subject: | Motherhood > Fiction. Adoption > Fiction. Foster children > Care > Fiction. Foster parents > Fiction. Interpersonal relations > Fiction. |
| Genre: | Domestic fiction. |
Show Only Available Copies
| Location | Call Number / Copy Notes | Barcode | Shelving Location | Holdable? | Status | Due Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gibsons Public Library | FIC HOWA (Text) | 30886001065131 | Adult Fiction Hardcover | Volume hold | Available | - |
- Booklist Reviews : Booklist Reviews 2019 March #1
The unnamed narrator and her husband Sebastianâshe is a forty-ish writer teaching online memoir-writing classes, he a fifty-ish artist with a stalled career and a heart conditionâdecide to foster and maybe adopt a child. They are underprepared for the normal challenges of parenting, never mind those presented by Maresa, a bright and lively seven-year-old. Armed with parenting guides and backed by a phalanx of social workers and therapists, some more helpful than others, the narrator and Sebastian spend a year trying to make it work. Traumatized by severe abuse, Maresa can switch in a heartbeat from charming sweetness to maniacal fury. And the narrator brings her own baggage of past trauma. Her father was murdered (an event from her own life that Howard documented in The Lost Night, 2005), and her first marriage was a disaster. The narrator is always addressing "you"âsometimes Sebastian and sometimes Maresaâwhich lends the novel a particular intimacy. Though rooted in memoir, this is compelling fiction, trenchant, heartbreaking, ultimately hopeful. Copyright 2019 Booklist Reviews. - Kirkus Reviews : Kirkus Reviews 2019 February #1
In this debut novel, a couple fosters a 7-year-old girl in hopes of adopting her, but trauma in the girl's past makes her future with the new family unclear. Memoirist Howard (The Lost Night, 2005) details the life of a well-meaning 40-something Northern California couple. "It starts with a face in a binder.â¦[It] says they need families that âtake risks,' but I won't notice this language until it's too late," the narrator begins. The couple, artist Sebastian (who becomes identified, gratingly, as "Daddy" for the duration of the book) and his wife, the unnamed narrator, foster Maresa, a precocious girl with big dimples and an even bigger personality. Maresa's entry into the household is difficult because she knows only pain and abandonment; like many kids in the foster system, she already has several failed placements behind her. The wife writes the novel as a letter to a future Maresa, expressing her own inadequacy and guilt. The novel is a study in the frustratio ns of the foster-care system and the shaky foundations beneath new families. Howard challenges current ideas about caring for kids with trauma and the conflicting advice about adoption for parents who are just doing the best they can. After a particularly defiant and violent scene from Maresa that triggers experts to blame the foster parents, Sebastian says, sarcastically, "I guess the New View is that you have to dig up some repressed trauma so that the onus is on you?" Though the novel can read at times like a catalog of indignities and frustrations rather than a story, its underlying restlessness eventually begins to coalesce into a driving question: Will Maresa be able to remain with her foster parents forever? "I want to be connected to both of you, at the same time," the wife writes. "Why is the geometry not working?" Realistic but often prioritizes the realism over the story. Copyright Kirkus 2019 Kirkus/BPI Communications. All rights reserved.
