This was a really beautiful and moving collection, though also obviously emotionally difficult and sometimes intense. The diversity of experiences--not just racial, obviously, but also feelings about the miscarriage and infant loss--I think also contributed to the power of the collection. It's clearly not the same story over and over.

It's also obviously an insight into the gap between medical knowledge and information and the way that people process their miscarriages. I think it could be really instructive for medical providers to read this and see the way that their reactions are perceived by patients, and understand how that's taken (in addition to the way that racism clearly impacts how patients of color, especially women of color and Native women, are treated by medical providers.) ( )

The five-star rating I've assigned here is rather 'loaded,' in that WHAT GOD IS HONORED HERE? is a very difficult book to read, filled as it is with wrenchingly sad stories of pregnancies cut short, stillbirths, and even one account of a four month-old victim of SIDS. It is, however, without question an important and necessary addition to the canon of women's studies, as evidenced by its subtitle, WRITINGS ON MISCARRIAGE AND INFANT LOSS BY AND FOR NATIVE WOMEN AND WOMEN OF COLOR. The women here range from Native American to Black to Latina to Asian to Filipina to mixed race. But the truth is it doesn't matter what color - or gender - you are, because these accounts of ruined dreams of motherhood and babies lost will simply break your heart. Because all of the narrators here are part of that "club that nobody wants to be a member of."

There are a couple dozen stories here and a few poems, and I strongly suspect the book's primary audience will be women, although this "niche" group of readers is much larger than I would have imagined, because many, many women have experienced the trauma of miscarriage and/or stillbirth. It's just not often talked about openly the way it is here.

I had a very personal reason for wanting to read these stories. I was the fourth of six children, but my mother had at least three miscarriages and one stillbirth that I knew of, but she never talked about them, so I figured - naively - that she'd pretty much forgotten them. She died several years ago at the age of 96, and I found this among her papers, undated, but written at least fifty years after the stillbirth she describes -

"Rocking Chair"

I rocked all my babies in this chair –
even Tommy, who was “born silent.”
Our Timmy Jim was five and already in school.
I so looked forward to having another baby.
When my work was caught up, I would sit in this little black rocker
and sing a lullaby to the new little one.
I have always been thankful and blessed
that little Tommy did get rocked and loved,
because on the day after Christmas he arrived only to leave us.
I had got a book on natural childbirth
and was doing very well, with nothing to put me to sleep,
when suddenly an ether cone was clamped on my face.
Doctor Kilmer knew the baby could never breathe.
When I awoke in the hospital bed,
the nurse very gently told me my baby boy was dead.
I wanted to see him and hold him.
They tried to tell me it was best I not see him at all.
But finally, in a dim light, he was brought to me,
wrapped in a soft blanket with only his sleeping face showing.
And I held him in my arms.
[Daisy C. Bazzett, 1916-2013]

I still cannot read this without weeping. So of course the stories here moved me, often to tears. For example, in Shannon Gibney's "Sianneh," when she is handed her stillborn child -

" ... they hand her to me. I cradle her in my arms and gaze at her, so exhausted. So elated. So destroyed. "

Or Diana Le-Cabrera, rocking her unborn child, in "Massimo's Legacy" -

"I sat in the rocking chair and sang 'Sleep Baby Sleep' to him. I swear I felt him move ... "

Or Rona Fernandez, telling us, in "The Ritual" -

"It's not easy being the mother of a dead child. In fact, it may be the hardest kind of mothering there is."

Indeed. I cannot begin to tell you how moved I was by every story presented here. To borrow a line from Arthur Miller, "Attention must be paid!" My very highest recommendation.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER ( )