Reviews of
The Children's
Hospital.
- - - -
"To read Chris Adrian is to take part in the exciting process of watching a
talented and original writer gain mastery of his powerful gifts."
—Myla Goldberg, New York Times Book Review
"The Children's Hospital has echoes of a children's book, as it takes on questions of good
and evil with an earnestness rare in adult fiction, while remaining
seriously fun to read; the funky everyday cohabits naturally with the
miraculous."
—Shelley Jackson, Los Angeles Times
"[Adrian] is a writer of prodigious talent who holds your heart in his hands ... And despite or because of his unlikely world view, he is irresistible. He sails into the inexplicable, seeking meaning; and the reader, gripped by curiosity and admiration, scrambles on board. Adrian's prose here is writing at its best—medical magical realism, you might call it ... We will be lucky as long as he continues to write."
—Boston Globe
"It's hard to read a book like Chris Adrian's new novel The Children's
Hospital, with its dead under seven miles of water, and not think about
Katrina and tsunamis, and then backward and landward to September 11 and
other traumas that, if personal, also demanded some kind of collective
notice."
—The Village Voice
"This novel is a singular event: Massive, recondite, often electrifying."
—Bookforum
"One of the most revelatory novels in recent memory ... Cleverly conceived and executed brilliantly."
—Andrew Ervin, San Francisco Chronicle
"Suspended between the poles of life and death, the physical and the
spiritual, the real and the imagined, Adrian's vast floating world of a
novel is a marvel. The Children's Hospital is intelligent, seductive and
beautifully realized."
—Kit Reed, Hartford Courant
Starred review. "In Adrian's second novel, an elegant and enormously
wondrous monstrosity, the world comes to an end, drowned beneath seven miles
of water. All that is preserved is a solitary children's hospital and its
occupants. Presiding over the apocalypse are four angels who often are
indistinguishable from demons; one to chronicle and one to accuse, one to
protect and one to punish. Within the floating hospital, medical student
Jemma Claflin discovers that a fearsome healing fire burns within her, a
fire that she uses to cleanse the hideously diseased children of their
"wrongness." It is useless, however, against the greater wrongness of the
rest of her ark mates, who struggle to maintain some semblance of normalcy
amidst the confounding swirl of the end-time. Adrian, poetically and with
exacting precision, has crafted a prophetic, difficult novel of compassion
and healing, but with a keen eye fixed on the damning reach of divine wrath.
The scalpel's edge between grace and violence, between healing and
putrefaction, can scarcely distinguish life as an obscene abomination from
the miracle it suffers to be. Adrian attempts a near-impossible summit, and
delivers a devastating, transformative work that is certain to burn in the
minds of readers long after the final page's end of the end of the world."
—Ian Chipman, Booklist
"This humanistic novel is a heartfelt portrayal of indefatigable spirit in
the face of utter helplessness and ruin. As you read, you can almost feel
yourself drifting along, staring out of a window at the endless expanse of
placid seascape, unable to shake the ominous feeling that something terrible
is in store for the survivors ... Adrian proves to be a suitable successor
to the mythological wherewithal of Rushdie or C.S. Lewis, and the book is a
solid testament to his array of talents."
—Time Out New York
"Adrian lays out a brave new world that is glorious and miraculous and
horrible all at once."
—Entertainment Weekly
"Chris Adrian, a pediatrician and divinity student, might be contemporary American fiction's best-kept secret."
—Richmond Times-Dispatch
"A frighteningly relevant tale of the end of the world, epic within the
confines of its setting."
—Paste
"When is a hospital not a hospital? When it becomes a post-apocalyptic
Noah's Ark inhabited by stentorian angels, deformed messiahs, and harried,
horny nurses. The Children's Hospital, published by McSweeney's, is a dark,
hilarious new novel."
—V Magazine
"McSweeney's has also just put out Chris Adrian's monumental (600+ pages)
novel, The Children's Hospital. This book strikes me as a bid to compete
seriously with the big literary houses, albeit under a different financial
model. At the book fair, the editors seemed to be waiting to see whether a
book with a modest promotional budget and independent distribution can
succeed in the way White Teeth and Motherless Brooklyn and Middlesex have. But if it is a just world, they don't need to worry. I started reading the book last week, and am pleased to report that it's everything I look for in
a novel—richly imagined, wonderfully written, ample in scope, formally
daring. In a word, serious. On the log-line alone—The Stand meets Cuckoo's
Nest meets the Book of Revelations—it should take off."
—The Millions
"The Children's Hospital is born of both medicine and theology, a novel in
which Gnosticism collides with diagnoses, and Old Testament-style cataclysms
dovetail with IVs. But The Children's Hospital is, thankfully, more than
that awkward marriage; it is also a thing of complex beauty and extraordinary insight ... More than a vision that combines fantasy and realism, philosophy and certainty, The Children's Hospital is also about everything in between. It's been a while since religion was this fascinating and moving—just as it's been a while since there was a work of fiction this challenging, inventive, and heartfelt."
—Portland Mercury
"Since finishing Chris Adrian's sparkling new novel The Children's Hospital,
I keep thinking of a couplet from deep within Yeats's poem 'Easter, 1916.'
'And what if excess of love / Bewildered them till they died?' 'Them' is
transformed here, however, from Yeats' 16 executed Irishmen to everyone—to me and you and all of our distant relatives who populate this Earth."
—SF Station
"The Children's Hospital is a wildly imaginative tale of loss and redemption,
its writing as varied and textured as the story it brings to life."
—Willamette Week
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