imaginative and compelling | The Children's Hospital

The Book of Jemma | The Children's Hospital | Chris Adrian

books:


	• The Children's Hospital Chris Adrian Grove Press, 2007 - 624 pages average customer review:based on 41 reviews view larger image
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Whose Hospital is it anyway?

I'm finally getting around reading this book for the second time, after thinking about it for over a year (this book won't let you off the hook once it gets into your head).

This time around, I think I'll keep the book's title in mind. The frustration from the characters within the book as well as from readers of it seems to be related to us all thinking that the hospital is there for the medical staff rather than the patients. Once you can accept that is not the case, the book has an incredibly happy ending...

I believe that partially, this book is about us, our medical system, and our society. But eventually, this book deals, like all truly great books, with you and me alone.

Don't pick at that bit of dry skin...

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imaginative and compelling

I really liked this book! It was so intreaging, and really captures big imaginations like mine. I had dreams that definately were rooted in me reading before bedtime. I am not religious, but found the religious themes interesting, especially with todays society leaning so much towards secular views. The end was sortof sad, but very appropriate. I couldnt imagine it ending any other way. (It was sortof trippy) You will need some time to reflect after reading it. I could see how some people might not like it, but if you have a gigantic imagination and loved incredible stories, read this book.

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The Book of Jemma

Perserved in a hospital, 1130 people survive the apocalypse in this epic, ambitious, beautiful, and devestating novel. This is the kind of book you immerse yourself into, pulling you down through all seven miles of water, stranding you alone in one huge building. At times it can be suffocating, at other exhilerating. There are some scenes that literally took my breath away (a massive healing through the hospital). At other times, the pages can't fly about fast enough (a boy's diary; an exploration off the hospial). And the end is so devestating and heartwrenching that you pain even for the least of characters.

All of this is blended together exceedingly well by Chris Adrian, who, it felt, made these promises, these glimpses of spectacle, in his previous novel (and a central character from that makes another central appearence here), and delivered far and beyond anything from that previous book. He can make the fantastic elements seem not at all fantastic or the real elements so bizarre you cannot believe them, and frequently mixes the fantastic and real and believability without a second thought. He's like John Crowley in his delicated handling of the fantastic, making it completley necessary for the entire story. He's like Gabriel Garcia Marquez in his ability to merge it all together (as well as utilitze long, harrowing paragraphs and passages). His characters are almost well-rounded and fully developed, though some of them start becoming more of thier destinies than their personas, but by the time that happens, the novel is so captivating that it doesn't really matter; it's like you know what you need to know about these people and their reactions and mistakes and flaws all come out in a display of flashing green light.

The book is both the most optimistic view of the Apocalyspe and the most devestating (it can be divided in halves, Thing One and Thing Two): it never quite reaches the brutality of Cormac's "The Road" or the chaos of Cuaron's "Children of Men" or the animosity of Miller's "Mad Max", and the book doesn't really need to and, concerning the subject matter, it probably wouldn't work if it did. Adrian isn't afraid to relieve the tension as he delves into dark subjects of religion, theology, death, salvation, and hope and there are plenty of scenes where you go, "Well, living in the hospital wouldn't be that bad." There's a tamale lady and a man with 8 wives; there's the most vulgar terms directed at angels that it can be nothing less than hilarious; there's ineffective people. At the same time, there's some of the saddest individulas you'd ever meet. Told through about four different voices of four different supernatural beings who collapse and build on themselves whenever they feel, Adrian somehow remains in complete and total control of the work and it shows.

Though long, clocking in at 615 pages, the book is completley worth it; it may even be the best book McSweeney's ever put out. Breathtaking and beautiful, devestating and moving, "The Children's Hospital" is a marvel.

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Hailed by the San Francisco Chronicle as ?one of the most revelatory novels in recent memory . . . Cleverly conceived and executed brilliantly,? The Children?s Hospital is the story of a hospital preserved, afloat, after the Earth is flooded beneath seven miles of water, and a young medical student who finds herself gifted with strange powers and a frightening destiny. Jemma Claflin is a third-year medical student at the unnamed hospital that is the only thing to survive after an apocalyptic storm. Inside the hospital, beds are filled with children with the most rare and complicated childhood diseases?a sort of new-age Noah?s Ark, a hospital filled with two of each kind of sickness. As Jemma and her fellow doctors attempt to make sense of what has happened to the world, and try to find the meaning of their futures, Jemma becomes a Moses figure, empowered with the mysterious ability to heal the sick by way of a green fire that shoots from her belly. Simultaneously epic and intimate, wildly imaginative and unexpectedly relevant, The Children?s Hospital is a work of stunning scope, mesmerizing detail, and wrenching emotion.

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