This was just so heartbreaking, so sad... just... i wanted to give her a hug and tell her it was going to be okay.

I really struggled with the length of this tale. There wasn't enough to sink your teeth into nor to leave you with a lasting memory or feeling of experiencing it.

An absorbing story told in the second person as a mother gives birth in the same hospital where her mother died.

Very well done and emotional!

Not my favorite in the this series, but definitely strong and well written. I love the connection of mother and daughter, even with the mother being not so mothering.

This is the second of the five Inheritance Collection short stories I have read. It’s about a woman giving birth to her first baby and her fears that she will not be a fit mother. Despite her misgivings, she ultimately attempts to gather her fortitude to make sure her child will have a much better mother than she did. It’s a strong story and well worth the less than an hour it takes to read it. I did demerit it for the second person POV, which I found awkward. Otherwise, it is a moving tale that I highly recommend.

Thank you to Amazon Original Stories, Net Galley, and Ms. Orringer for a copy of this story. Opinions are mine alone and are not biased in any way.

Pow, right in the kisser!

This is my kind of story. Told in second person, this short tale (32 pages) has a sense of urgency and poetry to it. Every bit of dialogue is so realistic, and it’s tinged with high-octane emotion. The talking itself is simple (and sort of choppy in a way that excites me), but its intensity matches the intensity of the experience we’re witnessing. There’s a certain rhythm that drew me in. All of this to say I loved this story to bits. It’s clever, intense, and well-told. Even the title is perfection.

Here, we have a woman who is about to give birth too early. I don’t want to give anything away so I’m being vague here on purpose. There’s rushing and danger, and I was right there as all hell broke loose. It hit me that I just love stories when someone is describing a powerful experience. It’s motion by motion, thought by thought—first of all fear, and then confusion, worry, and doubt, while the world around her swirls. There’s also a tragic back-story that is skillfully woven in.

If you’ve ever been pregnant and especially if you’ve had a complication, you’ll be sitting on the edge of your seat while you identify with the scene and emotion. I had some pregnancy complications and this story sent me right down a scary memory lane. I doubt the story would be as powerful for people who haven’t been pregnant, although I do think it’s extremely well-written and tense. I hope lots of people give this one a try.

This is one of five short stories in Amazon’s Inheritance series. Of the three I’ve read, this is the only 5 star, and it’s more like 6 stars if truth be told. Highly recommend. You can download it for just $1.99 (and no, I don’t own stock in Amazon, lol).

Thanks to NetGalley for the advance copy.

Having thoroughly enjoyed The Lion's Den from the Amazon Original Short Stories series I wanted to read some others and chose Can You Feel This? because I wanted to 'test drive' Julie Orringer’s writing style before venturing into a longer novel.

At first I was concerned that this might be post-modern naval gazing: anxious first time mother, childhood trauma, emergency situation etc.
But as I continued reading I realized the writing was evoking strong memories of the stress I had felt when starting to breast feed my first baby and the joyous relief when it all works out.

Definitely not what I was expecting at first, this beautifully written story describes the confusing, exhausting, emotionally-charged reality of child-birth.

Wow! This little story will generate huge swings of emotion in every mother that reads it (and if you are pregnant, maybe skip it until your child is at least a toddler). Orringer explores how our mothers affect the kind of mothers we will be. We can never escape our mother's shadow. This was a tough read for me but it was a magnificently written story. and if you liked it, check out Orringer's novel THE INVISIBLE BRIDGE. It is truly beautiful.

This was a beautiful and totally relatable short read. It described so many of the emotions you experience during birth and in those first few hours following having your baby.

The language used was emotional, raw and honest, describing both the positive feelings and the negative. A fantastic read for new parents who will see that all of these different and sometimes conflicting emotions are completely normal.

I liked the Jewish references, as well as the beautiful descriptions of the mother's feelings towards her newborn. I think this may be the first book I've read that was written in second person narrative and unfortunately I found this very distracting.

This book is a great short story of a couples first time bringing a baby into the world after having a tough pregnancy. Great read , wish it was a tad longer and had more depth of before and after the baby.

I have never read Julie Orringer. And I liked her short story, as a mother It is easy to connect with a story like this.

A pregnant woman is rushed to the hospital onset of her premature bleeding. The pregnant lady does not want to go to that particular hospital but it is the only one which is near. She is tensed about the birth as her doctor had warned about the complication her pregnancy has. But above all, her mother had died in the same hospital where she is taken for emergency delivery.

There is whole lot of emotions, memories that goes in the to-be mommy lady. A backstory on her mother and her relationship with her. Questions on motherhood.
Written wonderfully..

Thanks to Amazon Original Stories and NetGalley for ARC in exchange of honest review.
Happy Reading!!!

Can You Feel This by Julie Orringer is a short story.

First, let me thank NetGalley, the publisher Amazon Original Stories, and of course the author, for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

 

My Synopsis:   (No major reveals, but if concerned, skip to My Opinions)

 A woman's has a C-Section, and gives birth to a baby boy.  Her first few days have her ruminating about her fears of being a mother, and her memories of being in this hospital before...when her mother's dead body was brought here after her suicide.

 
My Opinions:  

This is one of five stories (all by different authors), in the "Inheritance" Collection of Amazon Short Stories.  They are all about secrets within families, and the consequences that come from those secrets.

Although this would not have been my first choice in reading material, I did enjoy the story, which really dealt with anxieties and fears.  Fear of being a mother, fear of not knowing what to do, fear of mental illness, and fear because she had kept her own mother's suicide a secret from her husband.

It was well-written, and an interesting story.

Can You Feel This? is a short story about motherhood and how our childhood effects or opinions. A woman is rushed to the emergency room because there is bleeding and her baby needs to come out. Since she never expected this child to live she never dealt with her feelings about motherhood nor told her husband about her mother's past.

I am not a huge short story fan but this one was very good. It was a perfectly self contained story and I did not feel that I was either given too much or not enough. Which is so surprising since the other work I have read by Julie Orringer is massively long. If you need something to read for an hour pick this one up.

This is the second I have read in the inheritance collection and it is even more raw and emotional than the first one I read (everything my mother taught me by alice hoffman)

I feel like this one got to me so much because I could relate to it so much with the emergency c section and then also not wanting to have a baby a hospital that held bad memories.

I honestly feel like it is so realistically written it's insane. The way its written its like its rushed but it's not its just that its truly written how quickly things happen, like instantly.

I cant say I enjoyed it because I wouldn't exactly use any kind of happy words to describe it as it was a very intense and sad book for the most part, but it provoked strong emotions from me so I'd say that's a great book.

5★
“Placenta previa is serious. A hundred years ago you’d surely die. The baby too. We don’t want you going into labor. Take no chances. Cancel all flights. No travel after week twenty-seven. No subway travel. No trains at all.”

. . . because if you suddenly bleed while you’re in the tunnel under the East River, you’ll both die. This begins like the a straightforward, albeit frightening, story of an average young couple (if there is any such thing) approaching the scheduled C-section of their first baby. The preparation, the nerves, and the how do you decide when it’s time to do what.

“What are we supposed to do now? you say.
We’re getting in the car, Ky says. We’re going.
I don’t have anything packed.
You’ve got the baby, Ky says.”

In this short work, we get a good luck at the young mother-to-be, “Mommy”, as hospital staff always insist on calling her, in spite of the fact that Emily and Ky have tried not to get excited over a birth that may not be successful. And Ky has no idea who “Daddy” is when they refer to him.

I felt for them both in their new, awkward reality – life and death at the mercy of the medical profession

It is written in the second-person about Emily, and there are no quotation marks anywhere. It's unusual, but I thought it worked well. We are in her head, sort of, and it's obvious there is more than the baby troubling her.

“It’s the tenth of June. Maples in full leaf. Cones of white blossoms on the chestnuts along the park. You drive over the Manhattan Bridge, over the sun-shot sharkskin of the East River, just north of that other bridge, the one you can’t look at because of what happened there.”

I was swept along with the story, worried about the couple, the baby, and ”what happened there.” I won’t include a spoiler – I’ll just add I loved seeing a sanctimonious ‘expert’ beaten at her own game.

Real and well-written and my favourite so far of the five-story series.

Thanks to NetGalley and Amazon for the preview copy from which I’ve quoted. This is one of five (so far?) stories from the collection called ‘Inheritance’ from Amazon Original Stories.

This was a well written short story. However, once the story got started it ended. I really wanted their to get more to the story.

Julie Orringer is another author I'd never read prior to discovering The Inheritence collection.   If her short story (novella?) <b>Can You Feel This?</b> is any indication of the type of novel she writes I'll definitely be seeking out her other titles.  

This is my favourite so far of the three Inheritence Collection stories I've read and I was surprised to find just how connected I felt to the unnamed central character and her husband Ky, especially as this was told in second person narrative.   This couple is expecting their first baby but instead of excitedly counting down to the big event they've been warned of the high risk the baby - and perhaps mother - may not survive the birth.   The onset of bleeding in her 36th week and a rushed visit to the hospital triggers a series of confronting memories about her own mothers tragic demise and an array of fears about how she herself might cope as a mother.    It was an engaging story and though it ended before I was ready there was a note of hope to it.

Thanks to Amazon Original Stories and NetGalley for the opportunity of reading this digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Wow, this is a powerful short story that exactly captures the fear and anxiety that all new mothers face with the unknown territory of being a first time mother. This is a short story from the Inheritance Collection. This is the first story I have read from this collection and it was excellent.

This was the fourth book I read in the Inheritance series, and the writing- with such urgency- had me hooked from the very beginning. But like the mother, I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop...