A review by quietdomino
After Birth by Elisa Albert

I'm not sorry I read this but I thought it was, as a piece of fiction, rather vile in its smallness and small-mindedness. The narrator's rage, and the lack of plot, smothered all the interesting plot upshoots--legacies of bad mothering (not to mention the Holocaust), the horrifying cruelties of medical sexism, the complexities of adult female friendship--under a heavy blanket of complaint that parenting a newborn is hard. True, but not, in itself, revelatory enough to sustain a narrative as sour as this one.