cover image Rocking the Babies

Rocking the Babies

Linda Raymond. Viking Books, $21.95 (272pp) ISBN 978-0-670-85263-5

This engaging, well-paced debut incorporates elements of the African American oral tradition into its tale of two women who meet in a Dayton, Ohio, hospital volunteer program to rock and feed premature infants. Strong-willed Nettie Lee Johnson, who hovers on the edge of poverty, has survived abandonment by her lover, then her daughter. Martha Howard, cautious, reserved and middle-class, finds that hospital work dulls the pain of her infant son's death and her husband's subsequent desertion. Both are strongly drawn to ``Baby X''-an anonymous, sickly baby girl-but only Nettie Lee knows that the child is her own granddaughter and the reason for her alarm at Martha's growing interest in becoming the baby's foster mother. As the two women exchange their life stories in order to alleviate the long hours and inevitable tension of intensive care, they create a bond that will be tested when tragedy strikes. Raymond moves gracefully between past and present and offers unusually accomplished characterizations. Though she self-consciously includes a politically correct mix of ethnic backgrounds and ends her story too abruptly, her compelling, uncomplicated prose and imaginative, credible narrative marks her as a writer with a future. (Oct.)