'Sometimes the perfect pregnancy is less than skin deep...A young man watches as a heavily pregnant doctor is stabbed in the street. He sees the knife, swinging down into that rounded belly, again and again, deep to the hilt.A few minutes later, the doctor has gone. Nobody believes what the man has seen.For Ana, the doctor, the incident is problematic. Back home, she peels off the damaged pretence of her pregnancy, a beautifully crafted garment, padded and slung across her abdomen. And she begins to realise that a story she has crafted with even greater care, is about to unravel. '
I've had to wait a while after reading Birthrights before I've been able to write my review. Normally I can delve into a book review pretty soon after reading it, but this book took me a bit longer because I felt that I needed the time to sit and think about it for a while. Birthrights isn't an easy book to begin to classify. I guess you could call it a thriller, perhaps even a bit of a mystery, but it's one of those books that's about something so different that you struggle to begin to place it purely in one genre.
The story follows Doctor Ana Griffin, a woman working in the mental health field. At the start of the story she's several months pregnant, giving a lecture on her approach to mental health care, one that a number of her colleagues disagree with. She's presented as a strong, confident woman, one who believes that her way is the best way of doing things, and isn't afraid to stand up for herself, as well as rocking the boat if needed.
After her lecture Ana is walking home when a former patient of hers, Robbie, attacks her. The attack is witnessed by another of her former patients, David, who sees Robbie plunge a knife into Ana's pregnant belly. The stress of the attack causes David to black out for a moment, and when he comes to Ana and Robbie are both gone, and there's no evidence that the attack took place. Ana has fled the scene, returning home; where she removes the fake belly she's been wearing to examine the damage that Robbie's knife has done to the padding.
This begins the true story of Birthrights, the main mystery of the book, and the narrative around which everything is centred. Why is Ana pretending to be pregnant? Over the course of the book we delve into Ana's past, discovering some deeply buried trauma that has resulted in her current course of action, of her paying for another woman to get pregnant and to give her the baby. Ana has been trying to maintain the illusion that she herself is the one having the baby, but thanks to Robbie's attack her carefully thought out plans are beginning to come undone.
Not only is Ana now having to contend with the colleagues that want her out of the job because of her methods, but thanks to Robbie's obsessive focus on her she's having to avoid the police, and a potential killer too.
Ana is the main focus of the book, even though we do get to see what several of the side characters are doing over the course of the story. We spend the most amount of time with her, and this is very much her story, even if it involves a number of other people. Everything that happens in the book is connected to her, and we see that it's not just the one single event that brings her carefully laid plans undone, but all of these little things together. It's the colleague that didn't keep Robbie in the hospital because he just didn't want to listen to Ana, it's the people at her work spreading rumours about her, it's the bureaucracy that slows things down and allows Robbie to keep slipping through the net. There are so many times in the book where one tiny difference could have helped prevent what happens at the end, and each and every time it's the worst case scenario that seems to happen.
The book is an interesting examination of how even if someone can feel like the centre of the world, where their story is the one that matters, it's the small connections with other people that make the difference. You can plan everything out, have scenarios in your head and ways to deal with them, but all it takes is someone you may never have met failing to pass on a message, or telling someone something a moment too late and it can cause everything you've worked for to come crashing down.
Ana is a woman that for the longest time I wasn't sure if I liked or not. She does things over the course of the book that I drastically disagreed with. She seemed cold, petty, and sometimes even downright nasty. But, the more time I spent with her, and the more I learnt of her past, the more I came to see that she was someone living with a lot of trauma, and that she was a victim more than anything else. It's rare to find a protagonist like this, one where they're not just flawed, but very human. People do strange things, sometimes seemingly awful things, but there's usually a reason for that beyond them simply being 'bad', and Ana is one of these kinds of people.
Birthrights might not be an easy read for everyone, it deals with some heavy themes around abuse, trauma, and pregnancy that some might find hard to read; but, it's an incredibly layered and interesting story, one that will challenge you.
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