Genre: Women’s
Fiction
Description:
Jess falls pregnant. Although the father is her fiancé, it’s not as
planned event. Then to top it all off, her baby arrives three months early. The
novel focuses on her time spent attached to the Neonatal Intensive Care unit at
her local hospital where her baby was being cared for.
Author:
“Jennifer Gilby Roberts writes chick lit /romantic comedy and women's
fiction novels and short stories featuring sweet romance and dry humour. They
will especially appeal to fans of Sophie Kinsella, Marian Keyes and Jane
Costello.
She has a degree in physics and a postgraduate certificate in
computing, so a career writing fiction was inevitable really. She was born and
grew up in Surrey/Greater London, but now lives in Richmond, North Yorkshire
with her husband, small daughter, two middle-aged cats and a lot of dust
bunnies.
Her main job is taking care of her daughter, who was born three months
premature but is now a healthy toddler.”
Appraisal:
What I like about women’s fiction, in general, is that the stories
often tackle complicated and deeply emotional subjects. I found this to be the
case with Early Daze. Only after I’d
finished the novel (in two sittings—fast for me) did I realize that the author
had first-hand experience of giving birth prematurely. For sure, her intimate
knowledge of the workings of an NICU added to a tale that grabbed onto me from
the first page.
Early
Daze is not a memoir but a work of fiction, and better for it because it
gives the author a broader canvass and allows her license to explore some of
the “what if” moments that I’m sure she pondered when she was actually going
through the trauma.
Ms. Roberts is one heck of a writer--crisp, clear sentences, deeply expressed
raw emotion, believable dialogue; all lightened by a smattering of the strange
humor that always accompanies human tragedy.
Jess and the other women with babies on the NICU form a loose support
group, all struggling to come to terms with the possibility that their babies
might not survive. These characters were multi-faceted. They handled the stress
in different ways that seemed very real to me.
Pivoting around the fulcrum of her preterm daughter, Jess, her mother,
her sister, and her fiancé shift and change and develop as they face up to the
sudden chaos of being tossed a premature curve ball that no one was prepared
for.
Highly recommended.
FYI:
Added for
Reprise Review: Early Daze was a nominee in the Women’s Fiction category
for B&P 2015 Readers' Choice Awards. Original review ran November 5, 2014
Format/Typo
Issues:
No errors. English spelling and English settings, but nothing that
would cause confusion.
Rating:
***** Five Stars
Reviewed
by: Pete Barber
Approximate
word count: 40-45,000 words
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