Description:
Readers know from the beginning of this warm, consistently interesting third novel that its main character, Meg Krantz, a New York ceramist and volunteer for an AIDS organization, will end up adopting Kimble Toffler, the orphaned 4-year-old daughter of one of the men she has been assigned to help. Even as his bouts of illness have worsened, Barry Toffler has maintained a superstitious fear of wills and guardianship papers, certain that as soon as he decides who should care for Kimble, he will drop dead. He watches the growing closeness between Meg and Kimble, and then, while dying, uses his remaining strength to scribble a note on a hospital napkin requesting that Kimble never be allowed to live with her loving but neglectful grandmother. Whether Meg, who had never planned on motherhood, can become all that Kimble needs depends largely on how she resolves her own troubled relationship with her chic, repressive mother, who has often expressed disappointment at Meg's lesbianism and her unadorned lifestyle, as well as her adopted grandmother: her hardheaded therapist, Libby. Unexpected Child is a subtle examination of a significant life change, partly willed and partly fated. --Regina Marler
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