In 1976, Fern and Edgar were a well-to-do couple with three children.  They are enjoying their summer at their beach house in New England as usual when they learn that all of their money is gone.  The shock of this news sends Fern and Edgar off on their own fantasy adventures. Edgar takes off with an uninhibited younger woman and Fern takes off with Mac, a giant (just a very large man).  Each thinks the other parent is at home with the children but the children are left alone.  Cricket, only 9 years old, is left in charge of her younger brothers. 

I unfortunately didn’t read the blurb about this book carefully enough and thought it was a serious look about money and class.  That is not the case at all and apparently isn’t meant to be.  Even though I had misunderstood what the book was like, I should have been able to get into the spirit of the book once I saw where it was heading.  But I just couldn’t stand reading about these parents and their selfish, childish response to facing a future of actually having to earn a salary.  Their children were much more mature than they were.  Maybe I just didn’t understand the humor but I didn’t find anything about this book humorous or filled with wisdom or brimming with humanity as advertised.

The only parts of the book that I liked at all were the parts of their family life before losing their money and Mac the giant’s story.  But it wasn’t enough to save the book for me.

This book was given to me by the publisher through First to Read in return for an honest review.

These stories are bizarre. That’s the best word to describe them. Even the stories that aren’t magical realism have that strange “people behaving weirdly” thing going on. The author definitely has a talent for making the realistic feel fantastical.

As soon as I finished this collection, I put Ramona Ausubel’s other books on my wish list because A Guide to being Born contains some of the best writing I’ve seen in a long time. The author takes small details and makes them hugely meaningful, but not in a melodramatic way. Every word feels significant and carefully chosen. The stories are both darkly hilarious and heartbreaking at the same time.

Like all short story collections, I like some of the stories a lot more than others. A few of the stories lack tension, and I struggled to stay interested in them, but, fortunately, most of the book was captivating.

I’ll summarize my favorite stories. (Actually, I have a lot of favorites, so I’m only going to talk about my favorite-favorites):

In “Safe Passage,” a group of grandmothers wakes up on a ship in the middle of an unknown ocean. The grandmothers aren’t sure if they’re alive, dead, or somewhere in between.

“Poppyseed” alternates points-of-view between a father and a mother. The father gives ghost tours of a “haunted” ship while the mother takes care of their disabled daughter. The structure of this story is slightly confusing at first, but I like how it discusses the rights of severely disabled people. This one turned out to be the most thought-provoking story in the collection.

“Atria” is the most heartbreaking story. It’s about a pregnant teenage girl who is convinced that she will not give birth to a human baby. Over the course of the story, she stresses about what type of animal she will give birth to and how to take care of it.

In “Chest of Drawers,” a man is so envious of his wife’s pregnancy that he literally grows a chest of drawers in his body. He fills the drawers with ethnically diverse plastic babies and some other interesting objects.

“Welcome to Your Life and Congratulations” is full of morbid humor. A family’s cat is run over by a car. Getting rid of the body turns out to be harder than they expected.

“‘We can do a cremation here, at the house?’ I ask.

‘We built a fire,’ my father says.

‘Obviously. And I put the whole cat in the fire?’

‘There isn't a whole cat,’ my mother says.

‘What is there?’

‘Parts of cat,’ they say together.

‘Bones?’ I ask.

‘Mostly. And some fur. And some face.’” – “Welcome to Your Life and Congratulations,” A Guide to being Born

As the title suggests, these stories are all about being born. Many of them are about pregnancy, but some of them examine birth in more subtle ways. The characters are born into death or into a new way of life. This collection feels more cohesive than a lot of short story collections. I enjoyed seeing the author’s different interpretations of the “birth” topic.

I’m looking forward to reading more of Ramona Ausubel’s work. This collection is impressive.

4/11 - A bit weird and slow, I'm not sure if I like it or not. I'll continue reading for now.

13/11 - This wasn't for me. It was just too weird. I was expecting the story of a town hiding from the horror of WWII and the Nazis, what I got was the story of an 11-year-old girl who is 'given' to her maternal aunt, who has been unable to have children, because her mother already has 'enough' children and it's not fair to have three children while some have none.

After the arrival of a stranger (who no one but the reader knows was forced to watch her whole family being slaughtered by the Nazis), the town (which I think is located somewhere in rural Poland) comes to the decision to cut themselves off from the rest of the world in order to keep themselves safe from the Nazis. They also decide to 'start the world over again' and make it as if the rest of the world doesn't exist, has never existed, it's the first day of the world and nothing existed before. This gives the childless aunt the perfect opportunity to ask for one of her sister's children, so that this new world that they've created is fair and equal. All this aunt has ever wanted is a baby, not a child a baby, so when the chosen child, Lena, is delivered to her new 'parents' her 'mother' decides that she is a new born baby who has to be cared for as such - including the use of freshly squeezed breast milk to feed her (that scene was when I first started to go "Uh uh, I don't think this is for me."). I just couldn't relate the idea of this tiny (only 102 inhabitants) town's desire to keep themselves safe from the horrors of the rest of Europe with making it okay for one unfortunately childless couple to take another couple's child, in order to raise her as their own. How does that fit with their goal of making a perfect world? For me it didn't, it just seemed to add to the horror of the era. DNF at page 150.              

I will be honest. My first thought on reading the synopsis of this book was "that idea is a bit far-fetched." But then I realised that I didn't live in that time, and I don't know what it must have been like to face the possible idea of your people being annihilated. As I read, I found how desperate the people of the village were to stay alive in their remote corner of the world. I can hardly blame them for trying to start again. At some point in our lives I would say most of us had a moment when we wanted to start all over again.

The story, the prose, the writing is beautiful, almost like poetry - it moved me and shook me up and at times, I found my heart breaking just a little, like in moments where Lena asked "how old am I?"

Beautiful. Highly recommend.