LOVE AND MODERN MEDICINE: Stories

The frustrations and rewards of modern domestic life provide the context for the 11 stories in this collection. Most of the characters are parents—new or experienced—contemplating both the wonder and the alienation of family life. Like the author (a pediatrician), many of the adults in these stories work in medicine or related fields and juggle various roles. An anesthesiologist in "Necessary Risks," for example, is more accustomed to her breadwinner status in the family than to spending time alone with her four-year-old daughter, and the obstetrician in "Freedom Fighter" contends with her third pregnancy while trying to find common ground with an old college friend on a weekend road trip in New England. Professional knowledge and competence is often contrasted with domestic helplessness, prompting internal psychological musing and admissions of fear and weakness. In "The Trouble with Sophie," a fruit-fly geneticist and her outgoing attorney husband react in very different ways when a kindergarten teacher recommends that their bright but undisciplined daughter attend therapy; in the title story, a pediatrician and mother reflects on the limits of modern knowledge when the half-sister she has never really liked loses her baby to sudden infant death syndrome. As a medical professional and nonfiction writer, as well as an award-winning fiction writer (Recombinations, etc.), Klass knows her territory well. (May 1)

Forecast:A Mother's Day promotion and Northeast regional author's tour should reach just the right audience for Klass's brand of humorous domestic realism. Accomplished but also easy to read, this collection should be an easy handsell to aficionados of contemporary women's literature and may attract crossover mass market readers.