COUNTING BACKWARDS

A contemporary woman’s quest to have a baby is interwoven with a historical legal case about involuntary sterilization.

In the present day, the narrator is Jessa Gidney, a young lawyer at a Manhattan law firm who lives in a posh Upper East Side apartment with her husband, Vance, a hunky finance guy. Sounds pretty sweet, but Jessa’s growing obsession with getting pregnant and her ongoing failure to do so are putting massive strain on her job and marriage. Orphaned when her parents died in a car crash, she was raised by her doting grandmother and feels driven to continue the family line. When she takes on a pro bono case helping Isobel Pérez, an undocumented immigrant, avoid deportation, she learns that while in detention her client was surgically sterilized without giving consent—and Isobel isn’t the only one. The book’s historical plot focuses on Carrie Buck, a real person who in 1927 was the plaintiff in the U.S. Supreme Court decision Buck v. Bell. Carrie was born to a single mother, grew up in poverty, and had little education. After she was raped as a teenager, she bore a daughter who was immediately taken from her. She became a test case for a Virginia eugenics law that allowed the state to sterilize “promiscuous” or “feebleminded” women, with or without their consent. The court ruled the law was constitutional, and the eugenics theories it was based on became a foundation for the Holocaust. As Jessa passionately pursues Isobel’s case, she learns shocking secrets, some too close to home. For the first part of the book, the interlinked stories, the abuses of the women in the detention center, and the women’s engaging voices make a compelling combination. But in the last portion, the stories of Carrie and the immigrants drop into the background and Jessa takes over. Some of her successes, though, are unconvincing, and the plot ends up with too many loose ends.

An intriguing pair of plots about women’s reproductive rights starts off strong but goes astray.