How to Care for a Human Girl: A Novel by Ashley Wurzbacher
How to Care for a Human Girl: A Novel by Ashley Wurzbacher
Publisher: Atria Books
Genre: Literary Fiction
Format: Kindle
No. of Pages: 347
Date of Publication: 8 August, 2023
My Rating: 2 Stars
My Thoughts
Jada and Maddy are sisters, both grieving the loss of their mother and trying to get by. Jada, an adult woman in graduate school, with a husband, and a home, and Maddy, a very young adult fresh out of high school, having an affair with a married man, cleaning houses and volunteering at a bird rehab/sanctuary.
I enjoyed this one, but wanted more from it. Although I knew about the decisions that both women made, I still left this feeling like I didn’t know much at all about the main characters, other than their pregnancies and I found the ending far too open with too many pieces of the story unanswered/open to be satisfying.
Thank you to Atria Books and NetGalley for the DRC
Description
From “a writer at the top of her game” (The New York Times) comes a bighearted and sharply funny debut novel about two estranged sisters and the crossroads they face after becoming unexpectedly pregnant at the same time.
Two years after the death of their mother, Jada and Maddy Battle both navigate unplanned pregnancies. Jada, a thirty-one-year-old psychology PhD student living in Pittsburgh, quietly obtains an abortion without telling her husband, but the secret causes turmoil in her already shaky marriage. Back home in rural Pennsylvania, nineteen-year-old Maddy, who spends her time caring for birds at a wildlife rehabilitation center, is paid off by the man who got her pregnant to get an abortion. But an unsettling visit to a crisis pregnancy center adds to her doubts about whether to go through with it.
Although Maddy still hasn’t forgiven Jada for a terrible betrayal, she goes to her for support, only to discover the cracks in the façade of her sister’s seemingly perfect life. As their past resentments boil over, the sisters must navigate the consequences of their choices and determine how best to care for themselves and each other.
With luminous prose and laser-sharp psychological insight, How to Care for a Human Girl is a compassionate and unforgettable examination of the complexities of choice, the special intimacy of sisterhood, and the bizarre ways our heated political moment manifests in daily life.
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