Ellen Meister strikes a delicate balance in her new novel, The Other Life, released today. Part women’s literature and part science fiction, The Other Life begs the question we all ask ourselves; what if?
Quinn Baverman is a Long Island wife and mother of six year old Issac who is perfectly happy in her life, until a surprising diagnosis, she is pregnant with a child who if she lives will be deformed and possibly brain damaged.
When faced with this devastating news, Quinn has to make a choice about whether to terminate the pregnancy or carry to full-term, even though her child may be born dead. Anyone would take pause at this point and wonder, did I do something, did my choices lead to this place? Could I have done something differently? And the what if”s begin.
Meister diverges from the strict soul searching when Quinn is not only able to think about what if she had made a different decision years ago when she choose her husband and life in the suburbs over her ex-boyfriend and a fast-paced city life, she can see the other life. Since Quinn was a child, she has known that another life existed, one where she made the opposite decision and she lived a different life.
In her “real” life is has a loving husband and beautiful son, but she has also lost her mother and is now faced with an impossible choice of her ending her pregnancy. In the other life, she has no children, just a boyfriend who acts like a child, but she also has her mother and no unbearable choices to make. And she can choose the second life to be her “real” life, if she wants.
Meister explores the depth of choice in her third novel, reminding us all that every step on the road of life is a choice. She asks her characters, and in turn her readers, to have the conviction of their choices and when at a crossroads, the easy way is not always the best way. The Other Life is a thoughtful, engrossing story of all of life’s “what if’s.”
The Other Life was received for free by The Boston Book Bums.
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