Rocking the babies

In the Neonatal Intensive Care unit of an Ohio hospital, two black women sit rocking babies who are either too small or too damaged to survive without the loving care of volunteer grandmothers. Martha Howard is prim, educated, and middle class. She's had many advantages in life, but she's stuck in the past, ruminating about the death of her infant son. Nettie Lee Jones is fat, poor, and caustically outspoken. She's raised five children and two grandchildren, including her daughter Yolanda, who's addicted to crack and who, as the novel opens, has just given birth to, then abandoned, her premature daughter. Although these women at first view each other with suspicion and contempt, they soon discover a profound mutual need. What begins as animosity ends in understanding.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.