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A Novel
by Jessica Winter
The author of Break in Case of Emergency follows up her "extraordinary debut" (The Guardian) with a moving novel about motherhood and marriage, adolescence and bodily autonomy, family and love, religion and sexuality, and the delicate balance between the purity of faith and the messy reality of life.
Book-smart, devoutly Catholic, and painfully unsure of herself, Jane becomes pregnant in high school; by her early twenties, she is raising three children in the suburbs of western New York State. In the fall of 1991, as her children are growing older and more independent, Jane is overcome by a spiritual and intellectual restlessness that leads her to become involved with a local pro-life group. Following the tenets of her beliefs, she also adopts a little girl from Eastern Europe. But Mirela is a difficult child. Deprived of a loving caregiver in infancy, she remains unattached to her new parents, no matter how much love Jane shows her. As Jane becomes consumed with chasing therapies that might help Mirela, her relationships with her family, especially her older daughter, Lauren, begin to fray.
Feeling estranged from her mother and unsettled in her new high school, Lauren begins to discover the power of her own burgeoning creativity and sexuality—a journey that both echoes and departs from her mother's own adolescent experiences. But when Lauren is confronted with the limits of her youth and independence, Jane is thrown into an emotional crisis, forced to reconcile her principles and faith with her determination to keep her daughters safe. The Fourth Child is a piercing love story and a haunting portrayal of how love can shatter—or strengthen—our beliefs.
"Accomplished and rewarding ... . Where The Fourth Child lives most vehemently is in the character of its problem child, Mirela. To her credit, Ms. Winter has done nothing to soften Mirela's broken edges, and her rages and demands seem somehow bigger and more real than the world that surrounds her." —Wall Street Journal
"[Winter] deftly depicts an all-too-human inconsistency: we may hold deep convictions until reality hits close to home. Every page is absorbing; book clubs will love discussing this." —Booklist
"Winter elegantly delineates the circumstances that create her characters' belief systems, gently lays bare their foibles and convictions, and shows how even the most rigid ideology can chafe against the messy and tender realities of life." —Lydia Kiesling, author of The Golden State
"The Fourth Child does something that seems impossible—it probes the Manichean abortion wars through a subtle and arresting family drama. Jessica Winter's portrait of Buffalo during the massive anti-abortion protests of the 1990s is pitch-perfect, and her exploration of the deep sacrifices of motherhood is indelible." —Michelle Goldberg, New York Times columnist and author of The Means of Reproduction
This information about The Fourth Child was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Jessica Winter is an editor at The New Yorker and the author of the novel Break in Case of Emergency. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Bookforum, and other publications. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her family.
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