In Every Way

November 3, 2014
Maria, the 19-year-old heroine of Brown’s disarming new novel, is having a time of it. She is pregnant; her mother, Karen, has stage four breast cancer; and her boyfriend, Jack, is cheating on her. Maria gives her baby up in a closed adoption to a couple, Philip and Nina, from Beaufort, N.C. When Karen decides she needs a change of scene, she heads from her home in Chapel Hill to Beaufort with Maria. Quickly bored, Maria begins stalking Philip and Nina and her daughter, Bonny (short for Bonacieux), who is now a few months old. Eventually, Maria applies for a job as their babysitter, not telling the unsuspecting couple who she really is. Maria loves spending time with her daughter, sketching her and even breastfeeding her. Things become complicated when Maria sleeps with Philip, and Jack arrives in town, trying to win her back. It all becomes too much for Maria, who hightails it back to Chapel Hill alone to face an uncertain future. The plot is reminiscent of Juno, if Juno were older and decided to befriend her child’s adoptive parents post- instead of pre-partum. Unlike that movie, this novel doesn’t settle for easy laughs. Instead, Brown (Doubles) burrows into his main character’s psyche to dramatize what it is like to be a young person trying to grow up in a world without signposts. Populated with other quirkily complex characters, this meditation on what it means to be a mother is memorable and affecting.

December 1, 2014
A teenage mother disregards the ethics of adoption in Brown's (Doubles, 2010, etc.) challenging new novel.When 19-year-old college student Maria becomes pregnant, the timing couldn't possibly be worse. Her mother, an English professor and Alexander Dumas scholar, is in the final stage of her battle with cancer, and Maria is neglecting school to serve as her caretaker. The baby's father, Jack, is more concerned with pilfering drugs and reciting Wu Tang Clan lyrics than with the idea of fatherhood. Maria's mother, close to death, finds herself suddenly pro-life, and Maria feels like she has no choice but to give the baby up for adoption, insisting that the records be closed. What her adoption caseworker doesn't know, however, is that the couple Maria chooses to parent her baby is not entirely unknown to her. While flipping through the book of prospective parents, Maria recognizes a couple who lives in Beaufort, North Carolina, where she and her mother visit every summer. After giving birth and spending a week nursing newborn Bonacieux, Maria changes her mind about the adoption, feeling "with absolute certainty that she should keep the child." But having already signed the 60 pages of release forms, she hands the baby over despite her misgivings-and then does everything she can to insert herself into the lives of adoptive parents Philip and Nina, even going so far as to become Bonny's babysitter. What follows is a tricky story about a birth mother who can't extricate herself from her child's life and the unraveling of the family she has chosen for her daughter. While the writing preceding the birth of Bonny is emotionally distant and often enamored with its cleverness, the rest of the novel is well worth the wait. Brown crafts a complicated tale of moral ambiguity about a woman who couldn't say goodbye to her baby after the paperwork was signed.

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December 1, 2014
Within the last year, Maria's motherher sole living parentwas diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer and given six months to live. And now Maria, a 19-year-old college student, is unexpectedly pregnant. Already facing her mother's death, Maria opts for life, delivering a daughter she names Bonacieux (as a tribute to her mother, a professor who is the nation's top Alexandre Dumas scholar) and putting the baby up for adoption by a couple she has selected based on seeing the man the summer before in Beaufort, her favorite seaside town. When Maria's mother asks to go to Beaufort again, presumably to die, Maria is so drawn to Bonacieux that she involves herself in her daughter's family, taking actions that appear to improve her mother's fragile health but are ultimately painful and unsustainable. Brown (Doubles, 2010) has a lovely touch with prose that ranges from funny to playful to moving in portraying birth, death, and relationships and examining what it really means to be a mother, making this novel as insightful as it is entertaining.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)