![]() I teared up a couple of times while listening to this book, and I am not a person who cries easily. Sometimes watching (hearing) a person maintain a stiff upper lip through tragedy can be the most heartbreaking thing of all. You could feel her biting back her emotions and her ironclad steadiness broke my heart even more, as I could still feel her pain through her stoicism. At first I felt it wasn't as personal, but in the end, it actually made the narration even more personal. McCracken keeps a firm grip on her emotions, even as she reads about the most horrible days of her life. Unlike Magical, where the narrator's voice occasionally trembled with so much emotion, in Replica, Ms. I had previously listened to The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, and she had a different narrator (although a brilliant one). I was initially impressed that the author was narrating this audiobook herself. ![]() From my point of view as a bystander to a similar situation, this rang extraordinarily true. Rarely has anyone so eloquent written about something so tremendously sad. This book is visceral, not just heart-wrenching but like going into your chest with a dull knife, ripping out your heart, jumping up and down on it for a bit, and then pouring salt on it. She does tell you right off the bat that she does successfully have a second child, but of course he will never replace her first child. Novelist Elizabeth McCracken's first son was stillborn. ![]()
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