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Book reviews

Kevin P. Keating’s Bridge of Dreams: A Speculative Triptych (IFF Books, 2025)

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Literary critics and academics would go into spasms over Kevin P. Keating’s latest novel, a fertile field for them to babble about its brilliance, infusing their reviews with every one of their favorite buzzwords learned in graduate school.

The rest of us ordinary humans (smelly, tired from our day jobs that feed our families and make our muscles strong, and uneducated hoi polloi that academics think we are) would simply delight in well-written, complex prose that entertains us for several hours and teaches us something about the human condition.

Therefore, if you, the reader of this review, is a literary critic or an academic, read the immediate following paragraphs, titled “For Academic Snobs”.  If you, reader, are an ordinary man or woman, go to the “For Hoi Polloi” section.

For Academic Snobs

Keating’s latest novel satisfies the deep desire for us academics to display our prowess in using polysyllabic literary terms and literary criticism phrases which may be meaningful to us (well, some of us) but are overused, tiresome, and thus insignificant to ordinary people.

For example, if one is a Marxist literary critic, then he or she would delight in the power relationships and polarities of the city vs. the country, or the uneducated in the rural environments vs. those in urban universities, or the economic struggles of the poor working classes of the nineteenth century vs. the civil rights of AI robots in the twenty-first century.

Similarly, if one is a feminist critic, then one would cheer with wild abandon the rise of female characters who break the mold of patriarchy and revolt against their oppressors and against males who use their phalluses in traditionally male occupations (in alphabetical order, even though alphabetical order is a component of the patriarchy: astronauts, chemists, farmers, pet owners [a boy and his dog, you know], space technicians, etc.) and who thus overthrow the aforementioned patriarchy to blah blah blah…male oppression, blah blah…patriarchy…blah blah…heterosexual normativity…and even more blah…whatever.

For those who are T in the LGBTQ configuration, sorry, but, while Keating’s novel is semi-fantasy, it is not a narrative of the mental illness of transgender persons.  In this work, a human with a dick is a man, whether that penis is represented by a cane or a rocket ship (hmmm…size does matter, huh?).

However, like most examples of an academic immersion into the application of literary theories to a work, which reduce themselves to mere adolescent snickering of phallic and yonic jokes, I digress.  Suffice it to say that academics (especially adjunct faculty in woke community colleges and universities which were once orthodox Catholic but have now fallen away from their Catholic intellectual and spiritual roots) could apply any of the other literary theories to the novel and write a sufficiently long academic article for a scholarly journal that no one would ever read but which would look real good on a curriculum vitae, especially if the article contains numerous instances of the DIE buzzwords (“diversity”, “inclusion”, and “equity”) and are coupled with LGBTQ terms, sprinkled with pro-Hamas terrorist language about killing Jews.

For Hoi Polloi

Readers who are ordinary real people and not pretentious academics, who believe in common sense, who are God-fearing, and who vote pro-life, work at their jobs and raise families or, if they choose to remain single, use their state of life for the betterment of humanity in their own unique ways, will greatly enjoy Keating’s novel as an instrument to satisfy the ancient Roman dictum that all literature should entertain and teach.

Admittedly, the narrative structure of Bridge of Dreams is challenging to follow.  Yanking the reader from a present which is not current (1957 and not 2025) to a century in the past (1857) and then thrusting him or her to two centuries in the future (2057) disturbs standard in medias res.

A chronological order of time in a narrative, however, is not the intention of this work, which attempts to connect the life experiences of contemporary (1957) odd rural Ohio characters somehow with the space activities of the United States circa 1957 with a nineteenth-century odd rural Ohio prophetess and a twenty-first century odd urban Ohio graduate student in English cavorting with odd rural Ohioans who affirm the existence of space “Travelers” (aliens).

Fortunately, the disruption in narrative time is eased by allusions to common cultural symbols, the recognition of which would encourage the reader to continue the journey through the odd narrative.  When a character “arrives at a murmuring brook that flows swiftly through sandy banks” (181), is that an oblique reference to Hawthorne’s babbling brook in The Scarlet Letter?  The most mildly educated person, someone called hoi polloi by the academic lords and masters, would delight in the allusion, even though this reader’s perception of the connection is utterly idiosyncratic.

Similarly, the following character’s reflection on the state of her existence:

“Do you ever get the impression,” says Ms. Deepmere, “that you’re not really here?  That you’re just a character in a story?  And you hope the reader doesn’t get bored and close the book?  Or the author stops typing mid-sentence, this sentence, the one I’m speaking right now?” (150)

Is this the fevered hope of the author himself or an allusion to Luigi Pirandello, whose Six Characters in Search of an Author was so groundbreaking in Western literature?

A final example will illustrate that some allusions are not idiosyncratic, but universal.  We who are hoi polloi (especially us PhDs who are labeled such by our leftist and woke “colleagues” in academia because we are Catholic or conservative and vote pro-life or Republican) will immediately perceive a topic in the novel which the world’s experience with the China virus generated: an eminently healthy disrespect for those who argue that the scientific method is the be-all and end-all of human life (see, for example, characters’ commentary on the failures of the scientific method on pages 122 and 198).

Above all, a final take-away from reading Keating’s novel concerns self-inflated academics and the powers that be who think they know everything about human life, its beginnings, its encounters with alien forces, or humanity’s relationship with the divine.  And Keating manifests this disdain through humor.

The comedic foundation of the novel leads me to see that academics and the educated classes don’t know (let’s see…how would hoi polloi say it?  oh, yeah) shit.  It’s as though the author (or the narrator, or the individual characters) are laughing at people who take this novel seriously, as though it’s a treatise by St. Thomas Aquinas to explain humanity’s relationship with God and how time and space are factors in that human-divine relationship as the Church Fathers suggested in the first three centuries of our common Christian era.

Is this why the author, early on in the novel, seems to allude to himself when a character talks about being shoved “down the stairs like a theater critic punishing the author and principal star of an unhappy farce” (50)?  If the author mocks himself thus, then we have his permission to enjoy the narrative by laughing at it.

The 203 pages of Keating’s work have satisfied my need for entertainment, sometimes laughing out loud at the impossibilities of characters’ destinies, and has given me much to ponder.  The Foreword to the novel by M. E. Pickett, editor and publisher of Lost Colony Magazine, says that Keating’s novel leaves him “with more questions than answers” (xii).  Yeah, OK.

In contrast, Keating’s novel impresses me with another didactic response, an answer to the contemporary malaise experienced by persons like Keating’s characters, seemingly bereft of religious faith.  This is Holy Week, not only for Christians but for the entire planet, and I must reflect on the merging of space and time which occurred, not in the fictional pages of odd Ohio characters, but in the God-Man who came to Earth to save us from human pride and stupidity.

But then, this reader-response personal conclusion is compatible with the novel’s numerous free-for-all associations.  If the novel can refer to a cathedral as a “medieval spaceship” (198), then contemporary readers and I will be perfectly justified in delighting in similar wordplay to challenge or to reinforce our beliefs.  For that reason, Keating should be congratulated for having produced a profound creative work.

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Seema Yasmin’s Unbecoming (Simon & Schuster, 2024)

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Thanks to Islamic terrorists who kill Jews and Christians, the West realizes that Islam is the religion of killing.  Seema Yasmin’s novel reinforces that view by depicting Muslim teens who mindlessly pursue the harming of women, the killing of unborn babies, and the alienation of fathers just like any other abortion zealot.  Sincere Muslims, therefore, should be outraged over this propaganda posing as fiction because Islam has nothing to do with such killing and destruction of families.

There is not much more to say about this tiresome teen abortion work.  The admixture of Muslim identities and a splattering of Arabic words may be somewhat new, but the plot is typical of pro-abortion propaganda: a teenager becomes pregnant, immediately thinks that abortion is her only choice, and irrationally rambles through a couple hundred pages to obtain abortifacient pills, disregarding other life-affirming choices available to her.

In short, it’s just another failed attempt to persuade young adult readers that abortion doesn’t stop a young woman from being a mother; after an abortion, she’s merely the mother of a dead baby.

Contemporary readers will find it difficult to sympathize with a teen who wants so desperately to harm herself, kill an unborn child, and alienate herself and the unborn baby from his or her father for two other accidentals, the first accidental being the needless background of Islamic identity: the anti-Semitism and uncritical adoption of unscientific woke ideology.

Western readers, constantly aware of Islamic terrorist attacks against Jews and Christians around the world and on American college campuses and streets, would not be sympathetic to Laylah Khan, the main character, and her pansexual best friend Noor for their espousal of Islamic terrorism.  The author notes that Noor has a Palestinian flag (54) and derides her journalism teacher for his “colonizer mind” (138); Laylah herself parades a “Free Palestine” bumper sticker on her car (266).

Nor would Western readers, who know simple facts of human reproduction, appreciate the irrationality of woke ideology manifested in the characters’ assertions that abortion concerns not a woman, but a “pregnant person” (48).  For example, in arguing with another Muslim, Noor aggressively says, “let me start by explaining that it’s not only women who get pregnant, okay?  It’s anyone with a uterus, and that includes people who don’t identify as women.  Okay?” (182).

Yasmin herself makes the propaganda function of her work clear, incorporating transgender irrationality, when she writes in the first paragraph of her address to the reader that the novel is her paranoid idea of “a dystopian future in which abortions were banned across America and pregnant people and their doctors thrown into jail—or onto death row—for even thinking about ending a pregnancy” (unpaginated ix; italics added).

If the insults to Jews and reproductive science aren’t enough, Yasmin’s characters condemn crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs), which help women reject abortion being sold to them by businesses like Planned Parenthood, using the most ad hoministic superlatives.  The usual adjective that abortion zealots use against life-affirming CPCs appears early in the work: “the fake clinics called crisis pregnancy centers” (31).  Much later in the propaganda piece, CPCs are asserted to be “the most evil thing ever” (220) and that the people volunteering at CPCs “are beyond wicked.  The worst kind.  Pretend to be do-gooders so they can win our votes and our trust and be our role models” (228).  Another of Laylah’s condemnations of CPCs [“those fake crisis pregnancy centers where they pretend to offer you an abortion but really they’re just using the facade of the clinic to lure you in and manipulate you into keeping the pregnancy” (234)] is merely a biased, paranoid assertion.  Nowhere does the propaganda piece contain a passage supporting her irrational claims.

Given such hatred against CPCs, the astute reader must conclude that life-affirming pregnancy resource groups must be cutting into the profits of the abortion business.  Why else would mere teenagers mouth such ridiculous and unproven assertions?

Instead of reading this mere propaganda with a Muslim twist, I recommend readers curl up with some great contemporary women’s literature on abortion, such as T. M. Gaouette’s For Eden’s Sake (review posted here: https://www.drjeffkoloze.com/t-m-gaouettes-for-edens-sake-2019/).

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Annie Cardi’s Red (Union Square, 2024)

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Annie Cardi may be just another abortion activist trying to influence teens through fiction to accept abortion (which harms and often kills women, always kills unborn babies, and alienates fathers), but she has given birth to a wonderfully hopeful and therefore pro-life novel.

Finally, a pro-abortion novel which shows that even the most abortion-minded teen can become a Dr. @AbbyJohnson…someday.

Of course, Cardi meets the criteria of a typical pro-abortion author (how else can anyone get published in the New York abortion literary establishment?).  When she writes in the “Author’s Note”, “I grew up Catholic, and the Church is clear about its negative view of reproductive rights.  That, along with other official Church views, didn’t sit right with me” (246), her pro-abortion credentials begin because being a fallen-away Catholic is a definite plus in said abortion literary establishment.

Moreover, Cardi uses the language of abortion (including, of course, woke) zealots consistently.  Her main character mentions twice that she is a staunch abortion activist not merely by “volunteering” for, presumably, a non-profit, but also aiding and abetting the abortion business Planned Parenthood, which passes itself off as a non-profit organization.  “I’m spending the summer volunteering at the Wolfwood women’s center and phone banking for Planned Parenthood” (240) is reinforced by a second reference to “volunteering with the women’s center and Planned Parenthood” (243).

Similarly, when she writes about the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, Cardi’s acceptance of unscientific woke language on gender may jar the reader, but is a seal of approval to the New York abortion literary establishment: “Now, in many states, pregnant people are at risk of being denied health care options” (246).  Pregnant “people”?  Cardi must think that men can become pregnant.

Finally, Cardi’s credentials with the New York abortion literary establishment are secure when she lists only pro-abortion entities on the “Resources” page (248).  This feature of fiction designed to steer teen readers into abortion businesses is the twenty-first century abortion zealot’s version of “Irish need not apply” or, in this case, “Birthright, Live Action, National Right to Life, and (for the post-abortion woman) Rachel’s Vineyard (@RVHealing) need not apply”.

These surface details are more interesting than the plot itself, which tries to instill more substance in what is a typical teen abortion novel by alluding to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, the premiere pro-life novel of world literature.  One key difference between Hawthorne’s and Cardi’s novels, of course, is that Hester Prynne did not kill the unborn child whom she conceived with Rev. Dimmesdale, while Cardi’s Tess Pine aborts the child fathered by her church’s youth minister, Alden.

Granted, the few allusions to Hawthorne’s life-affirming novel can be fun to perceive, satisfying the first essential future of literature to generate pleasure in the reader.  Although it becomes obvious that Alden was the father of the aborted child because he is relieved that Tess, like Hester, refuses to disclose his paternity (97-8), some pleasure derives from reading “When I do fall asleep, I dream about a giant comet streaking across the sky, turning everything orange and purple and red, waiting for it to fall to earth and destroy everything” (195), which matches the meteor incident in the twelfth chapter of The Scarlet Letter.

And yet, however much it strives to become an updated, twenty-first century version of Hawthorne’s nineteenth-century masterpiece, Cardi’s teen abortion novel is not a literary epic; it’s merely another teen abortion novel.

Since Tess’ abortion is mentioned on the first page of this 244-page attempt to mirror Hawthorne’s masterpiece, making whatever follows a slow, tedious slide to a presumably anti-life denouement, there are, however, many lines which pro-life readers can use to understand aborted women.  For example, Tess’ ambivalence about the word “abortion” is manifested on the first page: ‘That’s what we call it, though—‘the procedure.’  We don’t call it what it is.  It’s like we’re afraid to say the word, like it’s a curse.  Maybe it is” (1).

Likewise, Tess’ post-abortion syndrome manifests itself just as early in the novel: “I feel a strange kind of grief, a ghost ship sailing by.  Someone I’ll never know standing on deck, and me watching them disappear forever” (7).  This metaphor appears towards novel’s end, which demonstrates that the loss of either her innocent youth or the aborted child is subconscious throughout the novel: “Even if I wouldn’t change my decision, I remember that feeling I had after the procedure, of a ghost ship sailing past, and I think it’s something that will stay with me forever” (188).

It is incredibly sad, therefore, that Tess doesn’t yet realize that her abortion did not move her on a calculus of “last weekend, I went from being pregnant to being not-pregnant” (26), but from being the mother of an unborn child to the mother of a dead one.  Just as sad is the sense of hopelessness that mothers, especially teen mothers, must feel when they think their only choice is to kill the unborn child, as when Tess concludes that aborting the child “felt like the only way to get my life back to something resembling normal” (42).

Fortunately, for the fictional Tess as for all women who collaborated in the aborting of unborn babies, there is great hope.  Tess the fictional character mirrors real aborted mothers who still want to pray, join a community of believers, and have a relationship with God.  Tess often states, “I liked the idea that something bigger was watching over us, even while we were mini golfing, and that we were all connected because of it” (22).  Over a hundred pages later, Tess reiterates that, when she prays, “I felt connected to something larger and more powerful and mysterious, and all of that feels gone now.  I don’t know if I left it behind or if it left me, but it’s a loneliness that feels like a growing empty space in the middle of my chest” (138); a page later, “it’s part of me, deep down, and I feel ashamed to even want it, to know that God is still there and would listen to me, even now, but I do” (139).  Towards novel’s end, Tess’ prayers become deeper as when she says, “I miss you, I add to the end of my prayer, not even knowing what that means exactly, but maybe whoever’s listening does” (155; italics in original).  Although there are more instances of spontaneous prayer, here’s a final time where the idea of a faith community offers her connectedness despite the abortion: “I want to reconnect with a faith I had, to talk to God again and be a part of something larger than myself.  And I don’t know if what I did was right or wrong, exactly.  But that doesn’t mean I would go back and make a different decision” (173).

The novel’s denouement is ambiguous, appropriate for a pro-abortion character who has not yet found her place as a pro-life activist: “And maybe someday, I’ll decide it’s the right time to be a mother, and I will give my whole heart to that new person” (244).  Although her assertion of future possibilities would make abortion zealots foam at the mouth since it affirms heterosexual normativity, the competent reader can see in Tess’ problematic language (one-sided since there is no mention in creating a child with a husband in a covenant relationship called marriage), this life-affirming credo makes me hope that Tess and, most likely Cardi herself (if this novel is autobiographical) can become as pro-life as Dr. Abby Johnson.

After all, if Abby could be an employee of the abortion business Planned Parenthood, have two abortions herself, and become one of the nation’s major pro-life activists, encouraging abortion “clinic” (that is, business) workers to abandon working for abortion companies, then there’s hope for pro-abortion authors like Annie Cardi, fictional characters like Tess Pine, and, most importantly, women who think that abortion is their only choice to “get their lives back to something resembling normal”.

Abby, you’ll have a new convert soon.

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Colombe Schneck’s Swimming in Paris: A Life in Three Stories (Penguin, 2024)

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Kudos to Colombe Schneck, who has discovered a new way for secular women to abandon their robotic devotion to abortion: swim!

Schneck’s autobiographical fiction could be merely another typical pro-abortion read.  The main character, Colombe, is pregnant at seventeen, immediately wants an abortion, has the child killed, and lives the next thirty years in the blissful ignorance of a warped sense of sexuality and a gender-free ideology.

While the collection of three stories which constitute this “novel” is typical of fiction about abortion written by aging leftists, contemporary pro-life readers can come to several key insights about how sad the lives of those who support abortion can be and, hopefully, can learn how not to become as leftist or woke as those pro-abortion sad sacks.

For example, one insight is that pro-abortion “feminists” are needlessly angry at a basic fact of reality: gender.  Having been taught a gender-free distortion of human life by her leftist parents can thus account for Colombe’s idea that her teenaged woman’s body has betrayed her:

“When I was seventeen years old, I found out I was pregnant.  I couldn’t believe it.  I was furious: my body had let me down.  This wasn’t what I’d been taught, I hadn’t been warned about this.  I’d grown up in the 1970s and ’80s, in Paris, part of the intellectual bourgeoisie, where there was no difference between boys and girls, and pow! I had a girl’s body, a uterus.” (viii; italics in original)

A second insight from reading Schneck’s autobiographical fiction is that it can take decades for a woman to realize that appreciating her body can lead to her fulfillment as a gendered human being.  This is the case with Colombe, who, in ripe middle age, comes to appreciate her body only when it is free to float and swim: “I was completely inhabiting my body, it was an entirely unfamiliar freedom, bodily freedom, rapture, a sensuality that I alone was responsible for” (221).

Unfortunately, Colombe doesn’t make the connection between becoming more herself while she swims and the unborn child, who experiences his or her humanity swimming in amniotic fluid.  The novel ends one page later, and it would take many more pages for Colombe’s extreme self-centeredness to be purged from her.

A final insight is that Colombe’s account of her seemingly last fornication with a man who just wanted her for sex is typical of women’s writing: it’s tedious reading.

Conclusion: don’t spend too much time reading or making notes on this autobiographical novel.  If you want to spend some time relaxing with fiction, read some classic works.  If you want to use your time efficiently for intellectual stimulation, then much more interesting are Giorgia Meloni’s life-affirming speeches or studies on the rise of conservatism to correct the disasters brought about by European leftists who raised pro-abortion girls fearful of their bodies (like Colombe Schneck).

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Claire Coughlan’s Where They Lie (Harper Perennial, 2024)

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Cataloged as a novel concerned with abortion, Claire Coughlan’s Where They Lie serves the functions of being a good historical and crime fiction read and a thought-provoking condemnation of men who use women for their sexual pleasure.

The plot of this novel is relatively simple.  Nicoletta Sarto, a journalist, discovers that her mother was a disgraced midwife and an abortionist.  The development of this simple plot, however, is complicated by a byzantine collection of characters (I recommend developing a flowchart to understand the connections between the characters since there are so many names to juggle), long passages of questions from Nicoletta the journalist and answers from the people whom she interviews, and hints which are explained many pages later.

There is some enduring value in what is essentially a casual read.  Since Coughlan’s work is not an abortion apologia or mere pro-abortion propaganda like some contemporary fiction (one thinks, for example, of the ultimate in current preachy abortion novels, Deb Caletti’s Plan A [Labyrinth Road, 2023]), readers will appreciate the situations of women used by men as mere sexual toys, becoming pregnant, and not knowing how to care for themselves and the unborn children whom they carry.  The novel is set in Ireland in 1968, the year in which Birthright had just been organized in Canada, so contemporary readers must assume that, unlike today, the options for care of both the mother and unborn child may have been limited in Ireland besides the exemplary facilities sponsored by the Catholic Church.

Moreover, instead of advocating for changes in abortion laws to allow for the killing of the unborn or some other disastrous anti-life feminist notion, the various abortion-related references should make contemporary readers turn on the men who abandoned the women whom they used merely for sexual pleasure.

For example, Nicoletta, who became pregnant by a former lover, gave birth to the child; although the baby died, the anguish which she must have felt is compounded by the falsehood that the family created to prevent her shame (Nicoletta’s mother led everyone to believe that the child was her own and not her daughter’s).

Similarly, Nicoletta’s father abused several women for his own sexual gratification, including Gloria Fitzgerald, Nicoletta’s real mother.  The despair which these abused women felt over their unplanned pregnancies should bring shame to him and not the mothers themselves.

Even Nicoletta’s shame on engaging in an adulterous romance with another journalist on her newspaper’s staff is obscured by her own unplanned pregnancy by that lover.  Nicoletta goes from seeking an abortionist, to discarding the abortifacient pills he gave her, to thinking that maybe she could carry the baby to term and raise him or her, and eventually to feeling anguish at miscarrying the child, and this range of activities and emotions demonstrates that even a young woman who is devoid of religious faith feels the abandonment and despair of every mother when she is not supported by the father of the child, the man who should most support her in her time of need.

No doubt pro-abortion zealots would read this novel and argue a non sequitur claim like “See!  This is why abortion laws should have been relaxed in Catholic Ireland years ago—and should be legal throughout the world for all time!  Irish men can’t be trusted.  Women must have the power and the right to kill!”

Ordinary readers, who just want to curl up with a detective novel between donating to pro-life pregnancy groups and engaging in right-to-life political action, will appreciate the novel as a young woman’s adventure into discovering that her mother was a criminal abortionist and a murderer.  The girls among us will enjoy the novel as a bit of a romance: Nicoletta eventually becomes engaged with the father of her miscarried child, a man who loves her.

The boys among us will also appreciate the novel as an opportunity for catharsis, because beating the shit out of men who ignore their responsibility to care for not only the women whom they make pregnant, but also the unborn children who could be generated by their sexual activity is neither legal nor polite.

But real men, pro-life ones, already know that.

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Deb Caletti’s Plan A (Labyrinth Road, 2023)

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While she may have insulted women who get abortions by making her teen protagonist so stupid, Deb Caletti masterfully depicts how abortion zealots can indeed be STOOPID.

Granted, the novel is a tedious read.  Even the author herself (speaking through the narrator, of course) notes that the novel is “long.  Very long.  Four hundred and two pages long.  Thirty-nine chapters” (401; italics in original).  Many more interesting things began occurring in the world when I started to plow through this work: the massive election win of President Trump, the beginning of the overthrow of the useless and anti-American Democratic Party, the elimination of racist programs like DEI in the federal government, etc.  However, read it I did, if I want to be faithful to my duty as a pro-life English professor.

The plot is a standard, tired abortion story, a pattern used by Hemingway a century ago and Faulkner and Brautigan decades after him.  Sixteen-year-old Ivy DeVries becomes pregnant, is helped in her quest to kill the unborn child by a boyfriend, accomplishes the killing, and thinks she’s freed from the “burden” of being pregnant (when, as everyone knows, she is, post-abortion, merely the mother of a dead unborn baby).

Caletti’s contribution to this standard abortion plot, however, has two nuances.  Ivy becomes pregnant not by means of regular sex, but because another teen “stuck his penis near enough my vagina for sperm to make their unwanted journey to my egg” (253).  That’s about the only raw, if not salacious, sexual element in the novel, Ivy’s first episode of sex with her boyfriend being a typical encounter that perhaps was meant to arouse teens but which adults in a marital covenant would find ridiculous.

The second nuance which Caletti makes to the standard abortion template is much more important: Ivy is a first-class idiot.  I mean, the girl be dumb.  Stupid, as in stoopid.  If her first sexual episode with her boyfriend is laughable, then the stupidity which Ivy manifests throughout the novel would move the reader from chuckling at her ignorance as mere teenaged innocence, to scornful eye-rolls at her ignorant distortions of life-affirming feminist principles, to guffaws at her STOOPIDITY, especially when she illustrates how her pro-abortion distortion of feminist thinking blinds her to the logical fallacies and ironies of her own words.

Thus, this calculus makes the novel not only a joy to read, but also a literary tool which can be eminently useful for pro-life activists in their effort to study the myopic thinking of abortion zealots.  The morally blind pro-abortion characters may even help pro-life activists dissuade women from the practice of abortion (which harms them, kills unborn babies, and alienates fathers) because nobody would want to be so ignorant in life as the main character.

For example, Ivy’s innocence, the first step in the calculus, would make any reader smile or laugh lightly as when she illustrates her incredible ignorance about how she became pregnant: “I don’t even really understand how I’m here [in the state of thinking about being pregnant]” (8; italics in original) or “I didn’t even know you could get pregnant that way” (60).  Ivy’s naiveté continues to manifest itself hundreds of pages later when she stupidly asks her aunt, “You’re saying people have just been getting abortions forever?” (281).

For all her supposed smarts, being in advanced English courses and all, Ivy is as stupid at novel’s end as she was at the beginning.  Poor thing.

The reader reaches the second stage of scornful eye-rolls at her ignorant distortions of life-affirming feminist principles when Ivy’s preachiness about women’s rights, and oppression of women, and choice, and control of women’s bodies, and choice again, and blah blah blah overtakes the narrative.

For example, Ivy’s mother’s friend, who is presumably Catholic, discloses that she had an abortion and repeats the word “choice” intrusively in a few lines: “I might want to tell you this, but it’s your choice if you want to hear it.  We should have all the choices, every possible choice, when so much hasn’t been our choice” (155).  The author must have been self-conscious about the overuse of the word “choice” because she has the narrator offer this apologia for its repetition: “She says that word again and again, choice.  It’s a billboard, it’s a headline, it’s in neon lights.  It’s quiet, firm, dignified, self-respecting, a shout suppressed.  And, hey, ignored enough that it can seem like a gift instead of a right” (156; italics in original).

The reader’s possible guffawing reaction, the last step in the calculus, to Ivy’s stupidity occurs throughout the novel, especially when she illustrates how her pro-abortion distortion of feminist thinking blinds her to the logical fallacies and ironies of her own words.

On this point, the examples are legion.  Ivy uses the standard dehumanizing language of an abortion zealot in talking about or referring to the unborn child, ranging from calling him or her “‘a bundle of cells’ (according to some sites online) inside me”, the balance of the paragraph comparing the unborn child qua “bundle of cells” to her mother’s cancer cells (29); to an odd metaphor for the unborn child as “the grain of rice inside me, and […] the cells multiplying by the minute” (59); to Ivy using the demonstrative pronoun “this” to refer to the unborn child (255, repeated on 307); to the dehumanizing term with the longest grammatical history, “it” (308).

The ironies which the reader sees in Ivy’s stupidity ineluctably lead to guffaws, and these, likewise, are legion.  Ivy sees herself as a victim like Hester Prynne (87), completely unaware that, while the comparison does apply in that both Hester and Ivy are targets of adultery in the one case, fornication in the other, Hester gave birth to the child while Ivy will abort him or her.

Similarly, Ivy displays a lack of self-awareness when she asserts the following: “It’s sneaky, but when you get out of your own mind for a while and actually see other people and what they might need, too, you can feel, even for a minute, like maybe things will be all right after all” (90; italics in original).  That she cannot see what the unborn child might need or feel is either a blind spot on the author’s part or, most likely, more evidence of Ivy’s stupidity.

Ivy again compares her travels to kill the unborn child to a scene in the movie The Land Before Time: “young dinosaurs running from danger, fighting the odds, and struggling to get to the Great Valley—a tale of survival and teamwork and love, pretty much like this road trip” (201).  Here again Ivy is utterly oblivious that her abortion road trip does not end in survival of the unborn child and that the team collaborating in the killing does not love him or her—in fact, refuses to recognize him or her as a fellow human being running from danger, fighting the odds, and struggling to get to…birth.

Perhaps the weirdest irony occurs in Ivy’s statement about her “opinions”: “Another opinion I have is that appliances can hear, especially cars” (241).  Apparently, the AP English teenager is utterly bereft of basic contemporary fetological knowledge of the unborn child’s bodily functions such as movement in the womb or reactions to auditory and other stimuli.  Cars have feelings, but an unborn child burned to death in a saline abortion or dismembered in a D&E abortion feels nothing?

Stoo.  Pid.

Even other characters’ statements are ironic disasters if this novel is meant to highlight a pro-abortion perspective.  The irony of Ivy’s mother saying, “I want to respect your decisions around this, but it’s killing me” (119) would not be lost on an educated reader, whether a teen, young adult, or adult reader.  Ivy’s mother is blind to the fact that her own grandchild will be killed in Ivy’s abortion.

While it is not necessary to buy the book, I recommend that every teen, young adult, and adult pro-life activist borrow Caletti’s novel from a local library (libraries being the bastion of fiction like this which seem to be pro-abortion but advance the pro-life cause) if only to take a break from the serious matters of life: raising our families, voting pro-life, or donating to pregnancy support centers so that no mother would ever become as ignorant as Ivy, a fictional abortion zealot supreme.

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Book reviews

Ashley Wurzbacher’s How to Care for a Human Girl (Atria Books, 2023)

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An engaging novel to illustrate the negativity of an abortion-minded woman who is, apparently, utterly ignorant about the biology and purpose of her female body.

Combining the perspectives of two sisters, Jada and Maddy, faced with untimely pregnancies, Wurzbacher’s novel is more fascinating as a study of how a woman who purports to be educated (Jada) could be so stupid in her life choices.

Jada, an academic (which may account for her stupidity, since academia swallowed the pro-abortion and woke nonsense decades ago), thinks her marriage with Blake is not a covenant, an exchange of bodies for the satisfaction of a man’s and woman’s bodily and spiritual needs, but a mere satisfaction of options, which may account for the disdain which she shows the poor guy.  She aborts simply because she is “unexpectedly pregnant” [1] and because she merely asserts that “she would not have this child” (9).

Moreover, Jada suffers from a pronounced hatred of her body; only a massive dose of St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body can help her understand two essential matters of women in a covenant relationship called marriage: first, that a woman’s body should rejoice in sexual activity with a man who bears the title of “husband”; second, if that sexual activity produces a child, then she has the great opportunity to nurture another human life with her husband.

Jada, intelligent as she thinks she is, citing research work here and study there, doesn’t understand these aspects of the feminine.  Consider, for example, Jada’s sexual disasters with her husband Blake: “What he did know, what they both knew, was that her desire was dead.  When he reached for her, she rolled away.  When he touched her, she flinched, floundered, too slippy [slippery?] to be held.  The sex that had led to conception had been a chore” (4-5).

What a contrast, then, is Maddy’s view of her body:

“The fact was she liked her body, or at least she liked beholding it from the outside the way someone else would.  She liked knowing how others saw her.  There was power in this knowledge, or at least there could be if she could figure out how to use it, how to reconcile the body she admired with the body she inhabited” (151).

Now that’s a view of the female body that every feminist should have, at least pro-life feminists, since anti-life (violently pro-abortion) “feminists” disdain their reproductive capabilities to the point that they would rather kill unborn children (half of whom are their sisters) instead of nurture them to birth.

Of course, anti-life “feminists” would probably want Wurzbacher’s novel banned for the choice that Maddy makes regarding her untimely pregnancy:

“She was going to keep her baby, this sleeping boy’s half sibling, because she knew in her heart of hearts, in her secretest secret place, that though there might be someone out there who could give her child more than she could—more money, more material comfort, more opportunity of a certain kind—there was no one who could give it more love” (321).

Much more could be said about Wurzbacher’s novel.  For example, students could generate a substantial literary analysis paper on Jada’s use of the usual pro-abortion euphemisms (“the cluster of cells that had attached itself to her uterine wall” [2] or referring to her aborted child as “the clot” [261] or “the cell cluster that had clumped in her uterus” [264]) or Jada’s laughable reductionist view of the joy of sexual activity for husbands and wives to animal instincts and chemicals (“Jada was versed in the science of love, knew it as a pulse in the reptilian core of the brain, a hot spot of light in the ventral tegmental area, a squirt of dopamine” [132]).

Similarly, students could elaborate Maddy’s or Jada’s philosophical speculations into many essays for their ridiculous woke community college professors, such as two examples from Maddy: “No, she didn’t want a baby.  But she didn’t not want one, either.  She wanted only not to be in the situation she was in.  She wanted not to have to choose” (16) or “Please don’t say ‘baby’.  What a curse that you couldn’t refuse a thing without also acknowledging it, could not say ‘Don’t say “baby”’ without saying “baby”’” (49).

Likewise, consider these examples from Jada: when she speculates that her feminist philosophy may not be sufficient to account for her decision to abort the child because one’s conscience is the “voices in your head yelling at you at a volume no single voice outside of it could reach” (113); or the Kamalaesque word salad of Jada’s having “wanted to have wanted the child she didn’t want” (120).

Unfortunately delving into the merits of Wurzbacher’s novel isn’t as interesting as President Trump’s landslide victory and the activities of the next four, eight, twelve, and beyond years of pro-life presidents.  (Reading the few instances of Trump Derangement Syndrome spoken by anti-life characters is, at the very least, comical and quaint in the novel’s datedness.)  Suffice it to say that, on a snowy night when there is no more pro-life activity to accomplish, reading a few pages of Wurzbacher’s dive into the mind of a woman who aborted can entertain and educate one well.

 

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Book reviews

Mamoru Aoi’s My Girlfriend’s Child (Kodansha, 2022)

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Although it has some moral flaws, Aoi’s novel is a quick read, depicting an ordinary Japanese teen experiencing the doubts and joys of being pregnant with her teen lover.

This graphic novel, written in Japanese manga style, can appeal to American teens who often do not read words but may be adept at “reading” the emotional power of images in cartoons, online games, or other material.

Two moral objections to the book should be discussed.  The first concerns one character who says, “There’s no right or wrong here” (60), which may say more about the character’s amorality than a recognition that abortion harms women, kills unborn babies, and alienates fathers—truths which, since they are based on natural law, apply not only to Jews and Christians in the West, but also to Japanese presumably steeped in Shinto and Buddhist traditions.

Similarly, the main character’s litany of questions about the source for moral authority [“What are the criteria for what we should do?  Is it how the people around us feel?  Common sense?  Popular opinion?” (83; italics in original)] could be a string of questions formed not so much by the character’s amorality, but by any teen faced with an untimely pregnancy.

These questions could also generate great discussion among teen students, thus serving not only a rhetorical function, but a didactic one to encourage any teen contemplating abortion to determine the reasons why abortion is always morally wrong, let alone not reproductive or somehow beneficial.

The second moral objection to the book can be located in the “Sex and Pregnancy Q&A” section, where three items of bad advice are provided to teens about sexuality and abortion.  “The easiest methods for teens are condoms and the pill”, the advice suggests, ignoring the benefits of abstinence and respect for male and female sexuality which a couple enjoys in the covenant relationship called marriage.  Also, abortifacients are misnamed “emergency contraception”; sophisticated modern Japanese young people know that an abortifacient is not contraceptive, but the chemical means to perform an abortion, which is the killing of an unborn child.  Finally, the advice that “nobody should have a say in what you want to do with your body or mind” is not only ambiguous, but also illogical; Japanese and American teens cannot avoid knowing moral restraints on sexuality coming from natural law, a divine source, or from their parents or guardians, mature people who know more about sexuality than hormone-fevered teens.

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Book reviews

Aimee Wall’s We, Jane (Book*hug Press, 2021)

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Title this review: “A Case Study Proving That, Contrary to Prolife Feminist Principles, Anti-life Women / Pro-Abortion Zealots Are Not Comfortable in Their Bodies and Despise Biological Reality”.

Sometimes tedious to read since there is no major problem in the plot, Aimee Wall’s pro-abortion novel does provide a wonderful example of a young woman who chooses that destructive practice instead of caring for both the mother and unborn child because she despises her body.  Readers may therefore sympathize with a woman whose disgust over her female body leads her to [besides hints of lesbianism (35-6) and sadomasochism (141)] fornication, killing at least one unborn child, and alcoholism.

The three last-named activities are consistent with someone who merely glides through life with no purpose, no religious principles, no educational plan, no career objective, no ability to find a decent man who doesn’t just want to get into her panties, no this, and no that.

And Marthe, the main character, is what the Canadian author thinks is the best protagonist of her own “Great Canadian Abortion Novel” (9)?  Yikes!

The truth, though, is the opposite.  Marthe is just another sad sack of a drunken young woman who thinks promoting abortion is a necessary way to advance feminist goals.

Marthe is blissfully unaware that promoting abortion is the opposite of liberation for women.  In fact, at no point does Marthe consider any other choice for women experiencing unplanned pregnancies—this in the nation which in 1968 gave the world Birthright, the first prolife pregnancy support service so that mothers would not fall victim to thinking that their only choice was abortion.

Besides this primary blindness of the main character to life-affirming choices, the plot suffers because there is no crisis facing the women who think they must advance an underground abortion movement by becoming abortionist midwives.  In the novel’s milieu, abortion is still legal in both the United States and Canada’s Newfoundland province, and the work does not clarify what threats against “reproductive freedom” (that is, the so-called “right” of mothers to kill the unborn) would make it imperative for the women to become murdering midwives beyond the idea that there might be future provincial legislative action.

The lack of an essential problem in the plot, therefore, justifies Wall’s work as merely an academic effort, a “novel” which is more a postmodern exercise in writing fiction than a novel with a clear exposition, several crises, a climax, and a denouement.  Wall suggests this at many points when she writes that Marthe is more concerned not with action so much as she is writing a story: “She didn’t press Jane [her abortion co-conspirator] on the vague details, the gaps in the story.  She took the story as it was offered” (45); Marthe “tried to integrate this new information into the story” (126); Marthe speculates about “Jane losing control of their own story” (156); “This was the story Marthe told herself.  She was writing the story of Jane as they were still living it out” (196); and, finally, the repetition of the clause “Jane was a story” (five times no less in one paragraph) documents how the abortion controversy the author thought she was clarifying is all nonexistent, or implausible, or (worse) pro-abortion fearmongering nonsense (198; italics added in each quote).

Another flaw in the writing is not as fatal as the above and may merely be a mistake on the author’s part: “Within three months, she had gotten pregnant, he had accompanied her to the Morgentaler Clinic, and they had fallen in love” (15).

Huh?  Marthe first gets pregnant, then she aborts the child, and the next step is that she and her fornicating lover “fell in love”?  Isn’t the usual pattern in pro-abortion novels to fall in “love”, have sex, get pregnant, abort the unborn child, and then suffer PAS [which occurs soon after this tortured chronology: “Within another year and a half, Marthe had dropped out of her program and Karl had packed back up his single suitcase and moved home on a few days’ notice” (15)]?

Of course, while purchasing this novel is unnecessary (prolife readers should donate to pregnancy support groups which offer women with untimely pregnancies a choice consistent with their bodily integrity as women), the novel does have one merit: it illustrates how a so-called feminist (albeit an anti-life, pro-abortion one) blindly adheres to her hatred of her sexual ability to procreate because she despises her female body.

Readers who are comfortable with their maleness or femaleness may not understand Marthe’s intense disgust of her body in these statements: “It had been two years [since her abortion], but Marthe was still angry at the indignity of it all, at the insistence of the physical body” (19); “She felt that someone had done this to her.  The body.  Stuck her with it.  She felt, possibly belatedly, utterly betrayed by it” (21); or when Jane speculates about “people [who] become at home in their bodies” (38).

Think of it, reader: if you felt uncomfortable in your body, then you either had too much coffee or need to speak with an imam, minister, priest, rabbi, or psychiatrist.

Moreover, Marthe’s disgust of her female body could assist those who work with patients suffering from gender dysphoria, offering them a fictional account of the disastrous results of not recognizing that a human person is either male or female and should respect the abilities of both genders to engage in sexuality which is life-affirming and not life-destructive.  Students will find much more to write about, such as Marthe’s dehumanization of the unborn child (e.g. 10), why anti-life feminists view abortion as a matter of control (e.g. 43), or why those same anti-life feminists think that promoting abortion has almost a missionary or evangelical function (e.g. 45).

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Book reviews

Louise Kennedy’s The End of the World Is a Cul de Sac (Riverhead Books, 2023)

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Aside from depressing modern secular Irish characters engaged in adulterous sex, the abortion story which ends the volume is worthwhile reading.

Louise Kennedy’s anthology of short stories certainly entertains as casual reading; the stories also teach by illustrating the sexual depths and purposeless lives of Irish characters who seem bereft of their Catholic Faith.

The final story in the anthology, “Garland Sunday”, is a wonderful illustration of the power of post-abortion syndrome (PAS) experienced by a mother who cannot overcome the inherent guilt and anger following her choice to kill the unborn baby whom neither she nor her co-conspirator husband wanted.

Granted, we are all tired of abortion stories which follow Hemingway’s, Brautigan’s, or Irving’s templates, where the mother either merely considers abortion and may not decide to have one (Hemingway), or where the mother accedes to the killing and destroys the relationship with the father of the aborted child (Brautigan), or aborts the unborn baby and somehow justifies it as a more moral choice than giving the child up for adoption (Irving).

Both the mother and father of the aborted child in Kennedy’s story suffer PAS in the usual ways: Jerry, the husband, becomes angry with his wife, Orla, and the wife struggles to understand his anger.  However, Kennedy’s story nuances the ordinary template of an abortion account; while it is the husband who tries to reconcile with his wife, showing his effort to overcome his anger by being willing to have sex with her, at story’s end the wife remains frozen in her hostility:

          Does this mean we’re all right? he said.

          It means we’re having sex, she said.  Brisk, wordless sex.  As if there were children in the house.  (286; Kennedy does not use quotations for dialogue)

It’s time for Orla to attend a Rachel’s Vineyard session and for Jerry to focus on increasing the paternal love he has for their twin sons.  Maybe he can teach his boys that real men protect women so that they don’t feel compelled to choose abortion, a practice which harms them, kills unborn babies, and alienates fathers who should care for both the women and the unborn.

Of course, while the other stories riddled with sodomization and adulterous scenes would not justify purchasing the book (the depictions are ordinary tiresome salacious sex scenes), borrowing the volume from a public library if only to read “Garland Sunday” would enable a student to write a splendid paper on PAS and the hate that a woman who chose abortion could bring into her marriage.