How to Care for a Human Girl

Wurzbacher’s uneven debut (after the collection Happy Like This) explores two sisters’ experiences with unplanned pregnancies. Jada and Maddy, 31 and 19, are grieving their mother, 18 months after her death from cancer. Jada, a social psychology PhD student, terminates an accidental pregnancy without consulting her husband or telling him she was pregnant. The study she’s conducting on satisfaction from online dating becomes a metaphor for her own love life, as she struggles to choose between her husband, an old boyfriend she’s begun seeing again, and her independence (“Constantly, in her mind, parallel worlds presented themselves, butting up against the one in which she was living”). In a concurrent storyline, Maddy gets pregnant by a married state senator after she was hired to clean his house. Ambivalent about what to do, she visits a crisis pregnancy center in hope of some guidance, and is persuaded to keep the baby. She invites herself to stay with her sister for a while, where old conflicts resurface, as Maddy confronts Jada about the course of their mother’s treatment plans. Wurzbacher avoids didacticism when writing about abortion, focusing instead on the sisters’ efforts to figure out their lives as best as they can, though a rushed resolution doesn’t do justice to the characters’ complexities. This doesn’t quite fulfill its promise. (Aug.)