Book Review: Baby
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What Parents Should Know
Love. loss, friendship, and grieving are all themes here,
and the way these people, especially Larkin and Lalo, treat
each other is a model for human relations. Children may also
want to discuss the mother who abandons her baby, whether she
did the right thing, and whether she deserves to have her
back.
Common Sense Media Review
What to do with Patricia MacLachlan? Her career has been a
masquerade. She is passed off by her publishers as a children's
novelist, but she is really a poet, possibly one of our
greatest. She writes books of stunning, haunting, aching
beauty, of great gentleness and understanding and simplicity.
She is an observer of the smallest details, and she uses them
to devastating effect. She has that rarest of writing talents,
the ability to make her readers cry when nothing sad is
happening, simply with the power and beauty of her language and
the loveliness of her images.
MacLachlan can make her readers love her characters more than almost any other author, and when you read this book you will love Sophie. If you have married children, and want to nudge them into providing you with grandchildren, give them this book; it will make anyone long for a baby in their lives.
It is a shame that publishers don't often market a book on the children's and adult shelves simultaneously, for adults who don't read children's books really miss out on books like this. It is easy enough to read, and it is short, but only the most sensitive and intelligent children will love "Baby." Children who need action and adventure will find it dull; children with a capacity for gentleness and kindness and empathy will be entranced, especially if it is shared in quiet, private moments with an adult whom they love. But even if you don't have a child in your life, or if your children are not the kind who will enjoy this book, don't miss it yourself.
From the Book:
"And it will be another year like all the other years,"
said Lalo happily.
His smile made me smile, but I knew he was wrong. All the years were changed because of what I was missing and no one would talk about. And all the years would be changed even more than Lalo and I knew, for when we walked through the meadow of chickory and meadowsweet, when we climbed up and over the rise to my house, the basket was already in the driveway, a baby sitting in it, crying. My mother stood with her hands up to her face, shocked. My father's face was dark and still and bewildered. Only Byrd looked happily satisfied, as if something wonderful, something wished for, had happened.
And it had.
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