The Children Act

Living. The best novelists present readers with fully formed, complex characters, and place them in situations that reveal something true about our human condition, or what it means to live. Ian McEwan examines the choice to live or to die in his novel titled, The Children Act. Protagonist Fiona Maye is a judge in the family court in London, and her work life and home life are radically different. About to turn sixty, her childless thirty-five year marriage is strained because of her husband’s infidelity. Tension at work accelerates when she is called into an emergency case of a seventeen-year-old boy who has refused a lifesaving blood transfusion for religious reasons. Her visit with the boy pairs two intelligent characters struggling with what it means to live and to die, and the choice to live or die, quickly or slowly. McEwan reveals all this in a compact novel that delighted me from beginning to end. Rating: Five-star (I love it) Click here to purchase The Children Act from amazon.com.