Review by Booklist Review
Pregnancy has a funny way of attracting others' stories--strangers on the bus offer unprompted advice, colleagues share tear-jerking tales of wonder and horror, and fellow parents in the pediatrician's waiting room are quick to compare measurements and milestones. Narrator Anna, a writer pregnant for the first time, is mostly happy to hear these stories. She understands that many mothers feel silenced, and there's a certain freedom in sharing your deepest secrets with a complete stranger, or a friend-of-a-friend you'll likely never see again, or the woman struggling with the same poses in prenatal yoga class. Describing Hogeland's debut as a book about pregnancy would be overly simplifying, because it encompasses something much larger. A novel that blurs the line between author and narrator, and at times reads like memoir, it takes true-feeling stories and expands them into a compelling, often-heartbreaking tale of belonging, loss, and rebirth. Looking beyond pregnancy's physical transformations, Hogeland explores what it means to feel parental, to choose a life bigger than your own, or to lose a precious gift. Never veering into the maudlin or histrionic, The Long Answer is a heartfelt, finely wrought journey for fans of Suzanne Finnamore, Erica Jong, and Marian Keyes.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Hogeland's lackluster debut follows a group of women and charts their feelings about their pregnancies. First, pregnant narrator Anna gets a call from her older sister, Margot, with the news that Margot had a miscarriage. Some weeks later, Margot calls Anna to talk about her friend Elizabeth, and Anna thinks about how she's jealous of Elizabeth's friendship with Margot, which deepened after Elizabeth, who is also pregnant, confided a secret to Margot. At a prenatal yoga class, Anna meets a young woman, Corrie, who shares a story about an earlier pregnancy followed by abortion. Then Hogeland delves into a problem with Anna's pregnancy, and her writer husband's attempts to write a story about it. Later, Anna travels to Joshua Tree, Calif., where she meets an older woman named Marisol, who tells her a story about her own pregnancy and approaching menopause, which Anna uses in her own attempt at writing fiction. The gestures at metafiction feel undercooked ("This was never supposed to be part of this novel," Anna narrates in the middle of the Marisol episode), though Hogeland does a nice job showing the degree to which the women's lives are shaped by reproduction. Still, this doesn't quite cohere. Agent: Warren Frazier, John Hawkins & Assoc. (June)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Anna Hogeland, a 30-year-old pregnant writer who shares the author's name, chronicles the often unspoken fears and desires of the mothers and would-be mothers in her life. When Anna's sister, Margot, with whom she's always had a fraught relationship, calls to tell her she's had a miscarriage before Anna even knew she was pregnant, it sets off a series of conversations among sisters, close friends, and even strangers in Irvine, California; Anchorage, Alaska; and various points in between about the "closed grief" of pregnancy loss. Then, when things seem to take a turn for the worse in Anna's own pregnancy, her newfound empathy is put to the test: Will she emerge strengthened by this experience or as a diminished version of her former self? An introspective, psychologically astute, and engaging debut, this novel delves into territory that is rarely explored in fiction: the raw and devastating costs and painful choices that women face when a new life ends before it can begin. For fans of Rachel Cusk's Outline or Claire Vaye Watkins' I Love You but I've Chosen Darkness, here is a heart-rending tale that blurs the line between fiction and reality. In tight, unassuming prose, Hogeland unravels a complex web of stories about other women's lives, the stories they tell her about their own pregnancies and families, as Anna (the narrator) attempts to pinpoint which parts are true and which are false. At a critical moment we realize that the story she's telling and retelling about these other women is, in fact, the one she has been trying to avoid, the one that wasn't ever supposed to end up in these pages: her own story. "This was never supposed to be part of this novel," she writes. A startling meditation on grief and family and betrayal and the stories we tell about ourselves. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
