The Children's Hospital

by Chris Adrian

Book Overview

Hailed by the San Francisco Chronicle as "one of the most revelatory novels in recent memory . . . Cleverly conceived and executed brilliantly," The Children's Hospital is the story of a hospital... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802143334
• Release Date: October 2007
• Publisher: Grove Press
• Length: 624 Pages
• Weight: 1.87 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 1.8" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

I've been thinking about this...

I started reading this book about a month ago and I finished it this morning. It doesn't usually take me that long to read a novel. Not even a 600+ page novel. But there was a lot to think about here. Chris Adrians words are very beautiful and it was nice to really savor them. It is true that the first half of the book is easier to read. Not because its better than the second half-just because the author is very good at introducing his characters and forming relationships and surprising us. He never abandons these attributes. The story just gets more complex. It was important to me that the author didn't take the easy way out and he didn't. I felt a connection with Jemma that I have never felt with any other character. I could really relate to her and the fact that her character was concieved by a man still leaves me perplexed. I really enjoyed the chapters that take us back to Jemmas childhood. I felt nostolgic for her. At some point we are taken to her 4th birthday and Jemma's mother is constantly tossing her from activity to activity so she misses out on her own birthday cake. She is sent to bed after the whole thing has been eaten up by her guests...without saying too much...the end of this chapter made me cry. This is the only book that has ever made me cry. The premise is quite abstract-but its carried by intimate language that makes you feel like you're reading someone's journal.

A Richly Imagined Tale of a Modern Day Noah's Ark

Chris Adrian's THE CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL is a prodigious and darkly imagined tale of the Second Flood, or as his characters call it, the Thing. In this modern-day watery apocalypse, Noah returns in the guise of one John Grampus, an architect guided by angelic divine inspiration to design a nine-story children's hospital capable of floating like a ship. Grampus's plans are exotic beyond his wildest imaginings - he does not understand much of what he is designing, nor will he know its full capabilities and purpose until after the event occurs. Since the book opens with the beginning rainfalls of the second great flood, we learn about most of this in hindsight. We never witness the stages of doubt and disbelief Grampus must have endured, but Grampus is not the focus of Mr. Adrian's story. Rather, it is the bizarre, almost grotesquely ill children under care in this hospital who are the primary concern, along with a self-doubting, short-memoried, barely competent medical intern named Jemma Claflin (note the initials J.C.), her psychotically self-mutilating deceased brother Calvin, and her beau, Dr. Rob Dickens. An angel guides John Grampus in constructing the world's first uprootable floating hospital -- complete with post-Flood self-expansion capability and replicators that can recreate virtually anything from the "old world" - and angels occupy a significant place in the post-apocalyptic era. "It takes four angels to oversee an apocalypse," Adrian tells us early in his story: a recording angel, a preserving angel, an accusing angle, and a destroying angel. The reader is left to discover the identity of each angel and how they effectuate their designated roles. Once those inside the hospital (medical staff, suffering children, and some parents) get past the stark realization of their survival and its divine implications (compounded, no doubt, by the omnipresent recording angel), they relapse into barely modified versions of their former roles as tenders to the sick children. Life simply carries on, floating as effortlessly and aimlessly as the hospital itself over flood waters seven miles deep. A few relationships form, but only one bears the fruit of pregnancy - that of Jemma and Rob. At about the same time, the nearly medically incompetent Jemma is suddenly vested with extraordinary curative powers that radically alter life in the hospital and reshuffle everyone's roles and the pre-existing power structure in the "ark." Still, Jemma's powers are not limitless, and after a period of euphoria over everyone's well-being, a new disease nicknamed the botch appears that Jemma is unable to combat. A number of further strange events occur, and a new survivor is even plucked from the waters. To say more about the story would reveal too much for prospective readers. Suffice it to say that this all leads to a somewhat unexpected and literarily satisfying conclusion that does neat poetic justice to the Noah's Ark story and portends well for the "new worl

Words fail

I bought "The Children's Hospital" on an impulse--I'd never heard of it or of Chris Adrian, but the size of the book caught my eye and I was sucked in after reading the first few pages. Three days later, I can safely say that this was one of the best reading experiences I have ever had. I don't feel that I can accurately describe this book or how good it is, but even if I could I wouldn't. If you're going to read "The Children's Hospital" you should do so without any preconceived notions of what it will be like or what will happen, and please, PLEASE don't read the Washington Post review up above if you haven't already done so (it gives away too much). Just go out and buy this book.

Absolutely Excellent

Absolutely excellent. This is one of those books where you let all your coursework fall to the wayside and just read. I planned on reading it bit by bit for the rest of the semester--but I just couldn't put it down. The Children's Hospital is different from any other piece of magical realism you will ever read.

sin, sex, death, and the story of the end of the world

"The Children's Hospital" opens with the end of the world and builds in directions both pedestrian and transcendental from there. Part tale of and by an unlikely hero of a medical student, part mythic narrative as thought by the recording angel responsible for watching and chronicling events that represent a third covenant of God with the world, Adrian jumps back and forth between his ghosts deftly. It turns out that our world ends under seven sudden miles of water, the survivors those caught on a random night in a very unusual children's hospital. The remarkable order to their situation slowly starts to reveal. The recording angel doesn't try to hide this from you, but foreshadows much of the order that defines the rest of the book fairly quickly. And by the way, Stephen King should eat his pen in envy of Adrian's ability to deliver a thought worthy payoff to a book hundreds of pages after the actual apocalypse wraps up. Per his interviews, Adrian is a student at 'divinity school' and a fan of 'American religious history.' Christian readers might mind the absence of Jesus, except as a curse word. The one oblique New Testament reference is to Satan, though I still can't figure out if he was in the book. The pattern of the 'Thing' seems like the sort of thing the Old Testament God was always pulling, and that is at least satisfying. Though this book can't be read as future history, Adrian speaks to our times well. Death is Adrian's other purported obsession, and I believe I think of death a little bit differently now, especially after the stirring last few pages. A hospital is a place that rages against death to the very end. Perhaps it is appropriate that the apparent last moment of sin and death in human history would occur in one. The implications of the end of Adrian's world make his God's divergence from the new covenant seem somehow not so much a big deal, in fact, though I still do not know that I like why his God opens the floodgates. So why not? Why wouldn't God pick the most hopeless place, filled with the most innocent suffering to turn history again? A children's hospital is filled with sufferers of unnamed, chronic, miserable, even incurable disorders. Another author might pick such a place to discredit a loving, omnipotent creator. Adrian, having spent many nights in such a place himself, tells his story of a terrible and wonderful miracle and the possibility of all loose ends tied.