Recensori in anteprimaRosemary Nixon

"The news is like staring into an eclipse of the sun. Look at it straight and you’ll go blind." When Kalila is born to Maggie and Brodie, joy jostles for emotional space with devastation: their daughter has been born with a variety of medical problems doctors are unable to diagnose under a single heading. She struggles for breath, her heart seems compromised, and she cannot survive without the aid of machines and round-the-clock neonatal care. The young parents take turns sitting by the isolette, soaking up all information they can glean (which they must then decipher on their own). They watch the other babies in distress, and the other parents’ coping, or not, with the horror of those situations, comparing their own baby’s chances for recovery, their own place in this strange, bewildering universe they all inhabit. Maggie and Brodie are isolated by their grief, by their long, strange days, and by the people around them who—as well-meaning as they are—cannot help or understand. Maggie sits daily by Kalila’s incubator while Brodie teaches high school physics, musing on how theoretical physics like chaos theory and Schrodinger’s Box illuminate what he is experiencing. As the narrative employs shifting first-, second-, and third-person POVs, Kalila becomes a moving, penetrating meditation on grief, accentuating the isolation, the bewilderment, the spiral into deep despair, and the fierce struggle for the emotional survival of all concerned. This is a book not just about parenthood and the imperative of love and responsibility for another life, but a novel about illness and death, and how we—as a society—approach this universal yet feared element of our shared existence. Told with grace, honesty, and ultimately uplifting humour, Kalila is a sensitive, nuanced account of the strange horror of being a parent to a very ill baby.