Other Women's Children

by Perri Klass

Book Overview

Dr. Amelia Stern became a pediatrician to cure children, not see them die. In a kind of bargain she strikes with herself and fate, she does everything she can to save other women's children, hoping to keep her own child safe from harm. It's never easy. Amelia's hospital life contrasts so starkly with her cozy domestic world that she can't help but bring it home sometimes. Always available for medical emergencies and the needs of her helpless patients,...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0394586999
• ISBN13: 9780394586991
• Release Date: August 1990
• Publisher: Random House (NY)
• Length: 284 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.3" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

Two Lives -- Mother and Physician

Amelia is a female pediatrician dealing with the reality of her home life - a husband and son, both loving and healthy - and the reality of the sadness of dying children that she encounters daily in her work. It is difficult of her to reconcile these two aspects of her life. "You can't focus on the dying children. If you use dying children to draw up a scale of relative importance, then all the healthy children end up bunched together at one insignificant end. That won't keep them healthy. You can't protect them, you can't make deals - you may focus on the sick, but that doesn't guarantee continued health to the one you are ignoring. But that still doesn't show you how to stretch your life so that both kinds of importance can be successfully accommodated". (p.278) How Amelia learns to balance the different parts of her life and her attempts to become a more present wife and mother, make for a very moving and poignant book.

Klass a rare find

Klass is the type of writer who has grown by word of mouth, from reader to reader, across the country. Her novels show that rarest of combinations -- a sensitivity to the finest nuances of people's lives, a fine ear for pacing and dialog and, best of all, a great story. She writes with compassion for the human condition, unfettered by either sentimentality or superficiality. Although her books are hard to put down, they are even harder to forget.