CHILDREN OF EVER AFTER

In Yearwood’s novel, two women’s lives are changed by very different experiences of motherhood.

Rebecca and her husband—both distinguished professors at the University of Pennsylvania—live a life of elegant dinner parties thrown in their three-story Victorian home, but something is missing: a child. While staring at the condoms Will insists on using (meant for “prom nights…not for a woman in her late thirties,” she thinks bitterly), Rebecca decides to leave Will and become a parent on her own. As Rebecca researches designer sperm and adoption, across town, a young pregnant woman named Brittney is struggling to raise her two toddlers. After her irresponsible husband leaves her, Brittney is plunged into a nightmarish world of childcare woes, dead-end jobs, and a schedule so punishing she can’t find time to do the dishes. No matter how hard Brittney tries, it becomes clear—especially to theDepartment of Human Services—that she will not be able to raise her three children on her own. At the same time, Rebecca decides to pursue foster care as a way for an “older, single” woman to care for a child. Soon, these two very different women find their lives intersecting over the fate of Brittney’s three children as they are forced to confront their perceptions of one another and what it means to be a mother. Yearwood’s gift for characterization has readers rooting for both Rebecca and Brittney from the moments they are introduced. When the novel’s structure turns them against one another, situating them on opposing sides of a cold bureaucracy, it’s more than a clever twist—it’s a gut-wrenching experience. “You can’t just buy my children,” Britney thinks when she meets Rebecca for the first time in one of the story’s many well-observed instances in which economic tensions bubble under the surface (Brittney can barely get to the hospital to give birth while Rebecca quickly resolves the baby’s crying with a visit to a competent but expensive pediatrician). Through even the saddest and most difficult passages, Yearwood’s dry wit and literary style will keep readers engrossed, fascinated by the complex, beautiful women she has created.

A tender, heartbreaking, and exceptionally intelligent study of contemporary motherhood in all its complexity.