*** Without Children by Peggy O’Donnell Heffington

If you think that young people these days just don’t want to have children, Without Children: The Long History of Not Being a Mother will remind you that child-free is not a new concept, even if the phrase is. The historian author explores infertility, economic uncertainly, environmental concerns, and other societal reasons why women end up without children. She makes a great case for why we need to build more parent-friendly structures if we want to see more children among us.

*** Fruit of the Drunken Tree by Ingrid Rojas Contreras

Fruit of the Drunken Tree stars a girl living relative privilege in the Colombia of narco traffickers. Little by little her world crumbles as crime rises and her family gets entangled with the world of a new maid who has her own troubles. I thought the author perfectly portrayed how children sense the grown-up trouble around them without necessarily understanding it, and how they make decisions that can have severe outcomes. It’s not a happy book but do give it a try.

** Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng

I dislike dystopian novels on principle (there’s enough to worry about reading the news), so the bar is high, and Our Missing Hearts more than surpassed it. It’s the story of a boy growing up in a contemporary America that has institutionalized racism against Asians and dissenters of all types, breaking up his bi-racial family when his Chinese-American mother had to disappear to protect him and his father.

Years later, he goes on a quest to find her, with a rather improbable plot. The beauty of the book is in the depiction of the control that the regime exerts, although I felt that the technological environment we live in was not taken into account in a realistic manner. Also, the point of view of a child trying to understand his environment just feels right.

*** Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

The eponymous Demon Copperhead has a rough start in life: his father died before he was born, his mother is addicted to drugs and will die while he’s still  young, and his stepfather is abusive–but even as a child he has a good head on his shoulders and kind neighbors. That won’t be enough to save him from atrocious foster homes after he is orphaned, and so begins his long story of survival. I thought the first half of the book was fascinating as an appalling description of a foster care system that attracts bad actors. The second half, which focuses on the opioid epidemic, seemed heavily foreshadowed and somehow less potent. It’s not a happy story to be sure, but a strong one.

* Invisible Americans by Jeff Madrick

Invisible Americans: The Tragic Cost of Child Poverty advocates that all parents receive an allowance to help fight child poverty. This would work well as an opinion piece; it does not work as a book-length argument that starts with a conclusion the reader will naturally resist without a proper justification.  The book is also quite repetitive and could benefit from some thorough editing. Interesting idea, poor realization.

*** Foster by Claire Keegan

What a gem of a story. Foster stars a young girl whose parents are struggling with a large family and limited financial means and who is entrusted for a summer to a childless couple. There, she discovers love, caring, and a different way to live, serene and orderly despite life’s travails. The story ends when she returns home, an entirely different girl. A lovely and heartwarming book.

* Fierce Little Thing by Miranda Beverly Whittemore

There’s a lot packed in Fierce Little Thing: a cast of children abandoned by their parents, a mysterious murder, a commune led by a manipulative and fraught leader, a recluse, and a threatening summons. Despite all that, I could not bring myself to care much about any of the characters, even those forlorn children, because the plot had too many holes–and the solution to the mysterious murder was so heavily foreshadowed that I got it right away.

** A Good Time to be Born by Perri Klass

The overall message of A Good Time to Be Born: How Science and Public Health Gave Children a Future is upbeat: over the past century, even if the US lags behind other developed countries, the death rate has plummeted so that, whereas parents used to have to expect to lose some of their children, it’s now a rare occurrence. 

In each chapter, the author, a pediatrician, shows how progress was made for a particular disease or condition, and it often involves vaccines. She chooses to give many examples of wealthy parents’ kids to show that, even with a privileged upbringing, and until very recently, diseases that many current medical students have never seen in real life could and did kill.

Despite its overall message, I found the book a bit hard to take in: so many deaths!

 

* Bewilderment by Richard Powers

Bewilderment stars an astrobiologist whose wife has died in a car accident and whose young son is enmeshed in fantasy and not doing well. Inexplicably, he enrolls his son in an experimental, seemingly highly dangerous neurofeedback treatment, the results of which will be predictably disastrous. I spent my entire time reading the book shaking my head about the father’s utter confusion about how to raise a child post-disaster. (There are lovely passages describing the awe of nature, contrasting with the ineptitude.)

*** Invisible Child by Andrea Elliott

Slogging through the almost 600 pages of Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City will raise your blood pressure and your sadness meter both, as the heroine of this real story, the unfortunately-named Dasani, tries to mother her seven siblings while her mother and stepfather struggles with various addictions and the not-so-helpful social services of New York City. She even gets the chance to escape and attend a fancy private school, but that’s not quite enough to propel her to a better life. The strength of the story is that it follows her for many years. The author points out egregious problems in the way society pretends to take care of poor children, but could it ever overcome parental failures? We could certainly do better to cushion kids against them.