Engaging story about a first time mom-to-be with complications along with losing her own mother at such a young age. I'm not sure if I understood the ending.

This is part of Amazon Inheritance collection. ( )

Childbirth Trauma
Review of the Amazon Original Kindle eBook edition (December 2019)

Emotional and traumatic story of a couple dealing with a premature birth due to placenta previa. The mother is also dealing with the aftereffects of her own mother's mental health issues. This was so well written that you begin to imagine that the writer must have lived through something similar or knew someone who had.

Can You Feel This? is 1 of 5 short stories in the Amazon Original Inheritance Series. Buried or born, secrets are a family tradition. In this collection of emotionally resonant short stories, five fiction masters reveal that what is past is passed—inside households, across generations, and within the families of our own making. The time has come to share, and to bear, the consequences. ( )

I don't have much to say, I didn't like this short story. We focus on a woman about to have a c-section because of a condition she has. We have her thinking back on her mother and her childhood while obsessing over the imminent birth. I don't know, the whole thing just didn't work for me. I also think a few times the author wrote this as if some bad fate was about to befall all and then the ending leaves things on a hopeful note. Or maybe not hopeful, just not precarious anymore.

"Can You Feel This?" follows a woman (she stays unnamed I think through this whole thing) who suffers from placenta previa. I actually know about this a little bit cause my work wife had this and was on bed rest during the last two months of her pregnancy. So maybe I am just comparing how she handled things and this unnamed character and finding the fictional character lacking.

I also don't know if the book had been written in the first person if I would have felt more connected to the story. I wonder if Orringer wrote this in second person to put a distance between the main character and reader since the main character feels distant from her husband and child. And I think I just got fed up with it since the whole story is mostly going because of what happened to her mother when she was young this is why she is the way she is now. Which is only part of the story/things. You can choose to be different. And I think the ending was trying to telegraph that (badly).

I was initially going to read all of the short stories but decided not to. This one didn't work for me and I didn't feel like forcing myself to continue to read the rest of the collection. ( )

Perhaps more brutal and descriptive than someone who has never given birth can understand, Can You Feel This? painted a very intimate portrait of a woman giving birth to her firstborn, a woman who was told she might never be able to give birth and who expected to die or watch her infant die, a woman without a mother who grieved her inability to know how a mother should behave. While the birth and first days in the hospital are playing out, the woman struggles, remembering her mother's depression and suicide and all the secrets she has kept as a result. A difficult story, it was well told and ended beautifully. I received this book free from Amazon as part of the Inheritance series and reviewed it because I felt like it. ( )