The Fourth Child audiobook

“The Fourth Child” is an amazing literary domestic fiction story that is told from two viewpoints. It begins with Jane, who is a zealous catholic young girl, dreamy in her thoughts of all the female saints and Jesus. From the start, the reader is concerned for Jane who is taking her faith to a frightening level, fantasizing on how she too could be a saint, with all their suffering and humiliation. What sets Jane apart from many catholic enthusiasts is that she does practice forgiveness, compassion, and love. Jane’s kindness and patience is almost unreal though. Realistically, I have never met such a person as Jane, not even in nuns. In the interest of honesty, I will confess that I’m a bit jaded when it comes to the overly devote.Jane gets herself in a family way when she’s a Senior in high school. She marries the father, of course, as that’s what all good girls do. Her husband Patrick is her opposite. He is not kind; he’s cruel. And what Jane endures in her marriage does seem realistic to me (Yes, I’m jaded…I see the bad characters as true and not the purely good characters). Jane has a daughter, Lauren. Two years later she has a son, and one year after that she has another son. Thus, she has three children before she’s 25. Balancing her husband’s temper and the infants and toddlers are a lot.This is the backdrop though. The story gains legs when Jane sees a Barbara Walter’s special about the Romanian children who were stuck and ill treated in Orphanages. Jane is so moved by the images that she is motivated to adopt one of those needy children. This “fourth” child is Mirela, and she is a handful. Jane thinks of the blessed virgin mother, Mary, often, and she divines what Mary would do in all the difficult situations.Lauren is exasperated by her mother and by her destructive new sibling. Lauren’s chapters ring true of a girl who is coming-of-age with a fervent catholic mother. I ached for Lauren as much as I was perplexed by Jane. Adding to Lauren’s adolescent drama is the fact that her mother is a right-to-life activists who frequently protests pro-choice activists. And Lauren’s neighbor is a doctor who performs abortions. This doctor has a son who is in Lauren’s school and is incredibly kind to Lauren. As her children grow up, Jane does not inflict her believes nor religion on her children or friends/neighbors. Her devotion is her own. She’s not trying to persuade people to be more religious; she only wants to stop abortions and live a saintly life. Again, I have never met such a person (with the pure goal of compassion, empathy, and forgiveness), as generally their dogma clouds their “saintly” behavior, but, Winter writes her that way. Winter writes teen Lauren perfectly. Poor Lauren. She is left to navigate her teen years alone because Jane is overwhelmed by Mirela. In Lauren’s chapters, the reader will be right back into the uncomfortable time of high school.Of course, as the title implies, the story is truly about what the addition of Mirela does to the family. It’s difficult to like Mirela, even understanding the conditions from which she came. Winter does not pontificate nor steer the reader to her own views, other than there are kind and saintly people out there. She shows the complications that arise when one has good intentions and is focused on doing the right thing while blindly missing important issues. Plus, she shows how one child can dominate a family life.I listened to the audio, performed by Cassandra Campbell who is a favorite of mine. Campbell’s melodic voice adds to the story. I highly recommend the audio.

One of the many deep divides in American life is between those who are pro-choice and those who are anti. If you’ve ever wondered what goes on in the heads of the people who picket abortion clinics and harass women in the name of saving them, Jessica Winter’s account of the family life of an ardent anti-abortionist creates a plausible rationale. The story of one woman’s family is told in prose that is direct, undadorned, and always in character as Winter imagines her way into the consciousness of Jane, a girl brought up by a mother who is both Catholic and a wicked shrew, and then her daughters. Jane’s antique religiosity seems to be her way of trying to win approval from God that she will never get from her parents. She is anorexic like the saints were, starving herself to appear more virtuous in the eyes of God. And this is the 1970s. Some boys like them super-skinny, and Pat, a good-looking jock, is one of them. Somehow Jane’s zealotry doesn’t save her from becoming a teen mom. While her smart girlfriends go off to college, Jane gives birth to Lauren, characteristically, with a degree of self-martyrdom that almost leads to catastrophe. But she’s not raising her alone. Her jock boyfriend comes from a good Catholic family too. They marry. The result is an unhappy union that Jane endures with her usual insufferable saintliness. If you were Pat, you’d probably have some festering resentments too.Eventually Jane has two more children, both boys, whose antics provide some of the book’s lighter moments. But this is a story about mothers and daughters. Jane and Lauren alternate points of view. When a fourth pregnancy miscarries, Jane somehow feels cheated out of that baby. She returns from a trip to Romania with her fourth child, a deeply disturbed, malnourished and neglected little girl from one of the Ceausescu regime’s horrific orphanages. The Romanian dictator didn’t like the low birthrate in his impoverished country, so he outlawed abortion. The result was the widespread abandonment of infants to understaffed state institutions, where they were simply dumped into cribs and left screaming.The arrival of Mirela into Jane’s already fragile marriage creates a rupture that all the children feel, but Lauren feels most strongly. Her mother’s preoccupation with Mirela and with the anti-abortion movement leave her at sea and vulnerable. One of this novel’s many delicious ironies happens when the beloved daughter of an anti-choice mom gets pregnant. As a reader, I didn’t agree with all of Lauren’s choices. And for all her neuroses, Jane is not unlikeable. She does have a big heart. I was completely engaged with this novel, a page-turner to the end, with a last chapter that introduces a new voice, along with an unexpected feeling of hope.

A very engaging novel about a Catholic woman who becomes pregnant just before college and has to drop out and marry. She has 3 children and a good marriage. In the 1990s, she has a miscarriage. After she sees a 20/20 episode with kids in orphanages in Romania, she is driven to adopt a child and goes over and brings a three year old home. Being anti-abortion, she believes this is a way to prove how pro-life she is. The story is told between herself and her teenage daughter who is going through budding sexuality and her Catholic beliefs may her influence her life. Amidst the turmoil, a disruptive Romanian girl is causing problems and appears uncontrollable. It’s very engaging and drew me right in. I found the ending too scattered and lame to make me feel satisfied which was disappointing. And I found it alarming that with all the help the mother seeks to get help for her adoptive child, no one seeks out a native language speaker to help communicate with the girl or teach her new family some words in Romanian or another possible native language. Not even when the mother seeks professional help do the professionals do the professional thing that a professional would do by bringing in a translator and assess the little girl’s language development. Very bizarre and unprofessional! Her language is mentioned more when she is age 6and probably has no ability in the language anymore is it really mentioned in the book and the idea that the girl used to have to process in two languages before. Not necessarily true but very stereotypical to believe. But until the end I was pretty involved.

The book is a love story about a mother, Jane, and her children; she has a biological daughter and an adopted daughter. Jane is a devout Catholic and got pregnant in high school and had three kids in succession. As her kids become teens, she feels restless, which drives her toward two fateful decisions. One -she adopts a child from Romania named Mirela, and she becomes active in a local pro-life organization. I found it interesting how the author described Jane's process and how she includes religion in her life and its role in her life. There is also a focus on reproductive rights in the book.To listen to my interview with the author, go to my podcast at:https://zibbyowens.com/transcript/jes...

The Fourth Child is a winding story through a generation of family dealing with everything normal yet not normal at all. Jane, devoutly catholic grows up in her peculiar way of self punishment and almost relishes the emotional abuse she receives from her parents and boyfriend. She compliments the emotional abuse with self harm and borderline eating disorders yet when she becomes pregnant that changes. Jane adores her first child, Lauren and as the years go on we get to see through the eyes of Lauren as she is a teenager. After a sudden adoption the families life changes and unexpected consequences happen for the entire family. I really enjoyed this book. It is very much based on personal thoughts and beliefs as opposed to conversations so it's important to remember that the internal monologues are key. The book has a gloom sort of vibe but it was beautifully written and I adore the writers style. 4 well deserved stars.

Really liked the writing style- felt almost frenetic, like it was speeding up and I had to keep going to know what happens next. Family, abuse, sex, kids, abortion… this one is heavy.

This is a beautifully written, intelligent, honest, and at times, a painful book about families, motherhood, children, abortion, adoption, growing up, and living your life. If you want a plot-driven, feel-good, page-turner, this is probably not your book. But if you read to think and stretch your mind and heart, this novel is worth looking into.

This book is excellent. It is a subtle and engaging look at a mother and daughter(s) through the lens of abortion and adoption. There are finely wrought details and an immersive overall plot. It felt much different than Winter's first book.

This was better than I thought it would be. I was interested in how I would feel about this story given my views are completely different from the main character's.The beginning of this story threw me off. It starts with Jane as a senior in high school, and it details how faithful she is to her religion, how being Catholic defines her very thoughts. Jane would physically hit herself or say prayers if certain thoughts even occurred to her because she had consented to the thought. I also was not into how Jane got off on her boyfriend's demoralizing and objectifying comments about her body.I never managed to get a feel for Pat and Jane's relationship, but as a family, I could totally picture them with their three--and eventually four--kids. Lauren, Jane's daughter and the second main character, offers different views on abortion than her mother. This novel does center around the polarizing topic of abortion, but I think it was handled pretty well.Above all, I loved reading about Lauren and her siblings: PJ, Sean, and Mirela, especially PJ and Sean's relationship as they grow. It was written pretty well.The one thing I didn't like was how at some points, it was difficult to follow the writing. Characters would say certain things, and I had a feeling there was supposed to be some deep meaning to it, but I missed it. It happened more than once and was pretty frustrating. But overall, I definitely enjoyed this one.

** spoiler alert ** This book is so well written that it makes me want to take back the five-star ratings I've given to some other novels recently. I mean, I loved those earlier books, but this book -- it's really something special. Jessica Winter does a brilliant job of describing a particular kind of upbringing that leaves a person feeling perpetually guilty and unworthy. The section of the book that describes Jane's teen years is particularly compelling: she's both being suffocated by the constraints of her world view (an extremely rigid white Christian upbringing) and in free fall in terms of her perceived lack of agency (she knows she's going to make some poor choices even before she makes them, but she feels helpless to do anything to chart a different course). I loved having the opportunity to follow this character over a prolonged period of time: to see the far-reaching impact of the way she felt compelled to live her life on the lives of her two daughters. It's a story of heartache but ultimately redemption. Powerful stuff.

Yes, the title as an homage to Doris Lessing, as the author acknowledges in the epigraph. In fact, the entire book seems inspired by Lessing, whom I've never understood but always liked. The duality in Lessing is . . . um, I think . . . living with autonomy in a woman's body, and living in a society that commodifies that body. And so we spend 300+ pages inside the heads of Jane, a devout Catholic who tries to resolve the two diametrically opposed visions of sanctified womanhood, saint and mother, by becoming an anti-abortion zealot; and her daughter Lauren, a smart kid with a reckless streak. While the book follows a conventional narrative arc - from those character descriptions, you can pretty much guess The Life-Changing Crisis they'll have to face - the emotional journey is a lot less straightforward, since we have access to the women's bodies and brains but not their motivations. Decisions are made, no one makes decisions. Is that a meta-comment on femininity? Another complex and complicating factor is little Mirela, the hellcat whom Jane adopts from a Romanian orphanage on an apparent whim (once again, the stream-of-consciousness masks the process of choosing). Lauren's jealousy towards the screeching little lunatic is obvious and understandable, but never articulated. And once again, you're guessing correctly about how these conflicts are resolved, but once again, the mechanics of the plot feel at once familiar and entirely alien. Complex book.

I loved this. Winter’s prose is everything it needs to be; sometimes propulsive, sometimes meditative, always razor sharp. But the real highlight here is the character work. Winter draws such deeply understood, real, living and breathing characters. We fully grasp their interior lives and how they clash with various social, spiritual, and self-implemented restrictions and ideals. This is a beautiful book.

I don't typically read literary fiction, but I really enjoyed this book. It tells the story of Jane and her teenage daughter Lauren. Jane is a devout Catholic, and when she gets pregnant in high school, she immediately marries. By the early 1990s, she is trapped in a unhappy marriage, raising 3 children. She gets involved with the pro-life movement and adopts a child from Romania. I'm about the same age as Lauren, so reading it was like reliving my high school and early college days.

A wholly unique story! Fantastic prose, well-developed and complex characters. I would have thoroughly enjoyed this on its own, but the fact that it’s set in my native Buffalo takes it over the top. I was barely a fully-formed person when the murder of Dr. Slepian took place, but I remember it vaguely. So interesting to read this fictionalization of a moment in history.

A compelling book that I eagerly looked forward to reading each day. It will stick with me for a while. I’m not a fan of the horror genre and while this book is not in the horror genre it shares a sense of dread and impending doom that I found especially unsettling. I was constantly wanting to shout at the characters “don’t go down there” but I couldn’t take my eyes away.