The Fourth Child: A Novel
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"A beautifully observed and thrillingly honest novel about the dark corners of family life and the long, complicated search for understanding and grace." —Jenny Offill, author of Dept. of Speculation and Weather
"The Fourth Child is keen and beautiful and heartbreaking—an exploration of private guilt and unexpected obligation, of the intimate losses of power embedded in female adolescence, and of the fraught moments of glancing divinity that come with shouldering the burden of love." —Jia Tolentino, New York Times bestselling author of Trick Mirror
"A remarkable family saga . . . The Fourth Child is a balm—a reminder that it is possible for art to provide a nuanced exploration of life itself." —Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind and Rich and Pretty
The author of Break in Case of Emergency follows up her "extraordinary debut" (The Guardian) with a moving novel about motherhood and marriage, adolescence and bodily autonomy, family and love, religion and sexuality, and the delicate balance between the purity of faith and the messy reality of life.
Book-smart, devoutly Catholic, and painfully unsure of herself, Jane becomes pregnant in high school; by her early twenties, she is raising three children in the suburbs of western New York State. In the fall of 1991, as her children are growing older and more independent, Jane is overcome by a spiritual and intellectual restlessness that leads her to become involved with a local pro-life group. Following the tenets of her beliefs, she also adopts a little girl from Eastern Europe. But Mirela is a difficult child. Deprived of a loving caregiver in infancy, she remains unattached to her new parents, no matter how much love Jane shows her. As Jane becomes consumed with chasing therapies that might help Mirela, her relationships with her family, especially her older daughter, Lauren, begin to fray.
Feeling estranged from her mother and unsettled in her new high school, Lauren begins to discover the power of her own burgeoning creativity and sexuality—a journey that both echoes and departs from her mother's own adolescent experiences. But when Lauren is confronted with the limits of her youth and independence, Jane is thrown into an emotional crisis, forced to reconcile her principles and faith with her determination to keep her daughters safe. The Fourth Child is a piercing love story and a haunting portrayal of how love can shatter—or strengthen—our beliefs.
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Jessica Winter. (2021). The Fourth Child: A Novel. HarperCollins.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)Jessica Winter. 2021. The Fourth Child: A Novel. HarperCollins.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)Jessica Winter, The Fourth Child: A Novel. HarperCollins, 2021.
MLA Citation (style guide)Jessica Winter. The Fourth Child: A Novel. HarperCollins, 2021.
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| Shared Digital Collection | 4 | 4 |
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Jessica Winter is an editor at The New Yorker and the author of the novel Break in Case of Emergency. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Bookforum, and other publications. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her family.
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"A beautifully observed and thrillingly honest novel about the dark corners of family life and the long, complicated search for understanding and grace." —Jenny Offill, author of Dept. of Speculation and Weather
"The Fourth Child is keen and beautiful and heartbreaking—an exploration of private guilt and unexpected obligation, of the intimate losses of power embedded in female adolescence, and of the fraught moments of glancing divinity that come with shouldering the burden of love." —Jia Tolentino, New York Times bestselling author of Trick Mirror
"A remarkable family saga . . . The Fourth Child is a balm—a reminder that it is possible for art to provide a nuanced exploration of life itself." —Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind and Rich and Pretty
The author of Break in Case of Emergency follows up her "extraordinary debut" (The Guardian) with a moving novel about motherhood and marriage, adolescence and bodily autonomy, family and love, religion and sexuality, and the delicate balance between the purity of faith and the messy reality of life.
Book-smart, devoutly Catholic, and painfully unsure of herself, Jane becomes pregnant in high school; by her early twenties, she is raising three children in the suburbs of western New York State. In the fall of 1991, as her children are growing older and more independent, Jane is overcome by a spiritual and intellectual restlessness that leads her to become involved with a local pro-life group. Following the tenets of her beliefs, she also adopts a little girl from Eastern Europe. But Mirela is a difficult child. Deprived of a loving caregiver in infancy, she remains unattached to her new parents, no matter how much love Jane shows her. As Jane becomes consumed with chasing therapies that might help Mirela, her relationships with her family, especially her older daughter, Lauren, begin to fray.
Feeling estranged from her mother and unsettled in her new high school, Lauren begins to discover the power of her own burgeoning creativity and sexuality—a journey that both echoes and departs from her mother's own adolescent experiences. But when Lauren is confronted with the limits of her youth and independence, Jane is thrown into an emotional crisis, forced to reconcile her principles and faith with her determination to keep her daughters safe. The Fourth Child is a piercing love story and a haunting portrayal of how love can shatter—or strengthen—our beliefs.
- reviews
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- source: Vulture (The Best Books of the Year (So Far))
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"Jessica Winter's sophomore novel is Franzen-esque in its broad sweep of a Rust Belt family coming down off the highs of mid-century American capitalism. . . . She manages to elegantly and movingly write a novel about faith that doesn't proselytize or condemn." — Vulture (The Best Books of the Year (So Far))
"I loved this novel. It's as if Maile Meloy's Liars and Saints met Susan Choi's A Person of Interest. It's also a stealth treatise on Catholic mysticism. I loved its moral sophistication and nuance. There are consequences for character choices, which felt like a breath of fresh air." — Brandon Taylor, author of Real Life, finalist for the Booker Prize
"This is a work of precise social realism, in which the intricate tableau of detail offers a backdrop for larger questions about morality, family, and obligation." — Vogue (Best Books to Read in 2021)
"Jessica Winter's The Fourth Child is a brave, complex novel about a mother and her two daughters—and a morally astute exploration of the rewards, limits, and unexpected costs of faith and compassion." — New York Times bestselling author Francine Prose
"In this compassionate and riveting novel, Jessica Winter raises some of the hardest questions about motherhood, daughterhood, and personhood. In rich and insightful prose, The Fourth Child explores, with ravishing complexity, the inner lives of girls and women." — Helen Phillips, author of The Need
"Winter elegantly delineates the circumstances that create her characters' belief systems, gently lays bare their foibles and convictions, and shows how even the most rigid ideology can chafe against the messy and tender realities of life." — Lydia Kiesling, author of The Golden State
"The Fourth Child does something that seems impossible—it probes the Manichean abortion wars through a subtle and arresting family drama. Jessica Winter's portrait of Buffalo during the massive anti-abortion protests of the 1990s is pitch-perfect, and her exploration of the deep sacrifices of motherhood is indelible." — Michelle Goldberg, New York Times columnist and author of The Means of Reproduction
"A wonder of shape-shifting characters shored up by a political and cultural backdrop that is forever alive with simmering portent. It is a haunting and sometimes prophetic immersion of the ways in which lives can be trapped by the impossibility of what might have once been and the cold truth of what is now. These characters spoke to me in my dreams . . . I could not bear to come to the end, and I find myself wondering, even now, where are they? What might happen? The Fourth Child is, frankly, everything our best novels can hope to be." — Rachel Louise Snyder, author of No Visible Bruises: What We Don't Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us
"Intense . . . a vivid portrait of female coming-of-age . . . Winter is a genius. . . . [Her] greatest accomplishment is that she takes on enormous, highly charged topics—faith, the right to choose, female identity—and presents a story without one shred of moralizing. . . . A writer in complete control of her talent." — New York Times Book Review
"Magnificent . . . Winter gives us so much to chew on here—faith, adoption, sexuality, motherhood, abuse, autonomy—and the story warrants taking time to digest, to see how each moment informs and deepens another." — Buzzfeed
"Expansive stunner." — New York...
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October 15, 2020
Teen pregnancy, Christian faith, international adoption, and the abortion wars shape the story of a mother and daughter in Buffalo, New York. After an acclaimed debut (Break in Case of Emergency, 2016), New Yorker editor Winter tells the slowly unfurling story of Jane, a bookish and devout teenager with a mean mother and anorexic tendencies. Her tortured 1970s adolescence is cut short when she gets pregnant and ends up married to Pat and raising their daughter instead of following her friends to the University of Buffalo. One of the loveliest parts of this novel is Jane's early motherhood experience with her daughter Lauren--a sweet and sensual romance shaped by Jane's reading of D.W. Winnicott. She has a couple more kids, then the novel skips ahead to Lauren's adolescence in the early 1990s, also very closely observed: There's Drama Club, an inappropriate young teacher, Nirvana, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers....Winter's gifts for dialogue and characterization are evident in Lauren's best friend's analysis of her favorite musicians: " 'John is so depressed, ' Paula said. 'He can't handle the fame.' Paula talked about all her rock stars like this, like they were her friends who confided in her....She talked about Kurt Cobain's mysterious stomach condition like she was his personal physician." Jane gets involved in the Christian pro-life movement and surprises her family by adopting a deeply disturbed 3-year-old from Romania. For a long time, there is one leisurely episode after another with very little narrative momentum established. Is anything ever going to happen? Then, about two-thirds of the way through, you see exactly where it's heading, and it's so ripped-from-the-headlines that one hopes for a surprise. But Winter doesn't seem to care about plot; the quick series of climactic events at the end are the flattest parts of the book. On the other hand, if you have the patience, there is much--including snarky riffs on Buffalo and the Buffalo accent!--to enjoy. Excellent writing and well-developed characters contend with uneven pacing and a predictable plot.COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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January 4, 2021
In Winter’s smart second novel (after Break in Case of Emergency), a Catholic mother of three seeks greater fulfillment, first by volunteering for a pro-life group, then by adopting a new child. Stirred by a segment on 20/20 about the awful conditions of Romanian orphanages, Jane Brennan flies to Europe and adopts three-year-old Mirela, upsetting the dynamics between her; her husband, Pat; and their biological children. As the mischievous, overactive Mirela demands all of Jane’s attention, 15-year-old Lauren, Jane and Pat’s oldest, struggles with boredom like a “low-grade illness” and falls under the sway of her charismatic, manipulative drama teacher, Ted Smith. Meanwhile, Jane begins participating in demonstrations outside an abortion clinic and finds herself in the limelight for her role in an altercation during a blockade—and for her difficulty with Mirela, who wanders off during the pandemonium. Meanwhile, Ted and Lauren become increasingly intimate, and Jane intervenes in surprising ways. Jane’s narration can be a bit slow and tedious, but the novel takes off when it switches to Lauren’s point of view, building tension as Lauren finds her way through a difficult situation. Though the novel feels a bit schematic at times, Winter’s surprisingly complex characters make it worthwhile. Agent: Claudia Ballard, WME.
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January 1, 2021
Jane, her parents' fourth child, is a pensive girl, misunderstood by her mother. Her Catholic faith takes deep root; she delights in the gory plights of the saints and her own pain (self-inflicted and accidental), and wonders if or how she will attain sainthood. She gets pregnant by an emotionally abusive boy and marries him, eliminating the possibility of attending college as her friends scatter to larger futures. Still, she becomes a dutiful wife and adoring mother to a daughter and two sons. An unexpected pregnancy ends in miscarriage, pushing her foundation of faith off-center. As her children reach adolescence, she joins a radical pro-life group. When she adopts a deeply traumatized toddler, family equilibrium is thrown into upheaval. Alternating chapters between Jane and her daughter, Winter (Break in Case of Emergency, 2016) draws readers into depths of familial love that sometimes misses the mark, despite best intentions. She deftly depicts an all-too-human inconsistency: we may hold deep convictions until reality hits close to home. Every page is absorbing; book clubs will love discussing this.COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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"A beautifully observed and thrillingly honest novel about the dark corners of family life and the long, complicated search for understanding and grace." —Jenny Offill, author of Dept. of Speculation and Weather
"The Fourth Child is keen and beautiful and heartbreaking—an exploration of private guilt and unexpected obligation, of the intimate losses of power embedded in female adolescence, and of the fraught moments of glancing divinity that come with shouldering the burden of love." —Jia Tolentino, New York Times bestselling author of Trick Mirror
"A remarkable family saga . . . The Fourth Child is a balm—a reminder that it is possible for art to provide a nuanced exploration of life itself." —Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind and Rich and Pretty
The author of Break in Case of Emergency follows up her "extraordinary debut" (The Guardian) with a moving novel...
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