I Call Myself Earth Girl

August 1, 2020
An unexpected--and unexplained--pregnancy upends the life of a 40-something woman. Gloria isn't prepared to become a mother again at 46. With her only daughter expecting her first baby, she's "come to terms with being a grandmother before she was ready," but she hasn't accepted "being a pregnant grandmother." Yet pregnant she is--and in very mysterious circumstances. It's clear her husband isn't the baby's father, but Gloria is equally sure she hasn't had sex outside of her marriage. The answer to her mysterious pregnancy appears to lie in a series of troubling dreams featuring a person who identifies herself as Earth Girl, a celestial being who has returned to Earth and lives in a famine-stricken, war-torn country at an unidentified time in history. In these vivid dreams, Gloria experiences Earth Girl's rape (in passages that might be triggering for some readers) and subsequent pregnancy. But dreams invade reality when she herself becomes pregnant. Unsurprisingly, her husband and daughter (both lightly sketched) greet Gloria's explanation for her pregnancy with skepticism and anger, but once baby Ella is born, they quickly come around. Ella is no ordinary child. And Gloria continues to experience strange dreams that suggest that her daughter has a higher purpose that could involve the fate of humanity. Greene's debut novel tackles big questions about life, death, and the future of the planet. As Earth Girl tells Gloria, "Life on earth can never be fully understood. Life and all it holds is too big for humans to understand." Suffering happens because "humans have embraced pain and sorrow much more fully than they have embraced joy." It's also a moving portrait of a family under stress, with Gloria and her husband, Jared, facing the challenges of raising a unique child, dealing with health scares, and confronting tensions with their adult daughter, Melanie. Greene makes a strong case for embracing nonviolence and protecting the planet, as Ella predicts "a future more bleak and disastrous for society than you can imagine" if we do not "pay attention to important things." A creative, thoughtful exploration of the interconnectedness of human relationships.

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