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Fiction. Literature. HTML: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. From the Trade Paperback e… (more)
User reviews
If the story had just focused on Lore and Franckline and the eleven hours they spend together in the hospital, I may have enjoyed it more. Yes backstory is often necessary in order to fully understand the character and how they got to now, but the story seemed somewhat fractured when it would go off on tangents about Asa (Lore's ex-fiance and the father of her child) and his current girlfriend Julia (the woman he was with prior to and while with Lore).
The dreamlike sequences kept me off-balance and wondering where the story was going. I enjoyed parts of this book, especially the interactions between Lore and Franckline. I even enjoyed learning more about Franckline's backstory. I didn't particularly enjoy Lore's dreamlike, stream-of-consciousness sequences or the ending sequence. This isn't a badly written story or even a bad story, but it is simply one that is written in a style that did not allow me the opportunity to connect.
I would've finished this five days ago had the technical complication of my digital library book being removed from my iPad despite me trying to trick the system and turn off wifi. Had I finished it five days ago when I was completely wrapped up in the lives of Lore and
I was invested in the characters initially (well...it took a little while), but I felt like I never got enough of their story. This is very much a snapshot, a moment, an experience between two women -- a nurse and her charge. Ultimately this is a good start to a longer story that I wish the author would've told.
I didn't really want to spend more time with Lore, so I wasn't engaged and started noticing errors. She's a speech and language therapist, but got a four year degree (part of the plot). That specialty requires graduate study. At one point, the labor nurse grasps
As it went on, the plot just seemed more contrived. Every character, well, every female character, had something unusual about them. Except for Annoying Nurse Carol who was just annoying. The men were cardboard. Oddly, this probably fails a reverse Bechdel test, because the men are only there to explain what the women do.
Finally, the ending is also "special", a rare occurrence. My wife went through something similar and it was much more calm and controlled than this description. For example, at one point, I noticed the nurse quietly moving furniture to make a clear path from her bed to the door of the room. That seems like a more telling moment than the things that happen in this book.