How to Care for a Human Girl

March 1, 2023

A National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree for the story collectionHappy Like This, Wurzbacher returns with the story of two sisters wresting with past betrayal--and unplanned pregnancies--two years after their mother's death. Prepub Alert.

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July 17, 2023
Wurzbacher’s uneven debut (after the collection Happy Like This) explores two sisters’ experiences with unplanned pregnancies. Jada and Maddy, 31 and 19, are grieving their mother, 18 months after her death from cancer. Jada, a social psychology PhD student, terminates an accidental pregnancy without consulting her husband or telling him she was pregnant. The study she’s conducting on satisfaction from online dating becomes a metaphor for her own love life, as she struggles to choose between her husband, an old boyfriend she’s begun seeing again, and her independence (“Constantly, in her mind, parallel worlds presented themselves, butting up against the one in which she was living”). In a concurrent storyline, Maddy gets pregnant by a married state senator after she was hired to clean his house. Ambivalent about what to do, she visits a crisis pregnancy center in hope of some guidance, and is persuaded to keep the baby. She invites herself to stay with her sister for a while, where old conflicts resurface, as Maddy confronts Jada about the course of their mother’s treatment plans. Wurzbacher avoids didacticism when writing about abortion, focusing instead on the sisters’ efforts to figure out their lives as best as they can, though a rushed resolution doesn’t do justice to the characters’ complexities. This doesn’t quite fulfill its promise.

July 1, 2023
Since their mother died from cancer, sisters Jada and Maddy haven't been as close. Rigid older sister Jada, 31, is a PhD psychology student who wants to meet family expectations even if it means putting her own feelings aside. Maddy, meanwhile, is a 19-year-old free spirit who lives at home with their father, cleans homes for a living, and volunteers at a wildlife rehabilitation center caring for birds. When both women unexpectedly discover they are pregnant--Jada with her husband's child, and Maddy from an affair with a married man--they each face the enormous decision of whether they want to take care of another living being. As they come together in their time of need and attempt to overcome past hurts and resentment, the sisters learn to let go and make the choices they feel are best, regardless of what others may think. In a lovely and tender way, Wurzbacher, author of the story collection Happy like This (2019), presents a heartwarming novel about grief, sisterhood, and the scary but liberating power of choice.

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