Life Sciences - by Joy Sorman (Paperback)
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<p/><br></br><p><b> About the Book </b></p></br></br><p><b>"Joy Sorman's <i>Life Sciences</i> takes an overtly political premise--the medical establishment's inability or perhaps refusal to take seriously the physical struggles of women--and transforms it into a surreal and knife-deep work of fiction that asks: What pain can we abide, and what pain must we fight back against, even if the fight hurts more than the disease itself?"</b></p><p><b>--Lena Dunham, <i>The New York Times Book Review</i></b></p><p/><br></br><p><b> Book Synopsis </b></p></br></br><p><b>An inventive coming-of-age novel from acclaimed French novelist Joy Sorman, <i>Life Sciences</i> boldly investigates the female condition, bodily autonomy, and the failings of modern medicine as one young woman confronts a centuries-old, matrilineal curse.</b></p><p>Ninon Moise is cursed. So is her mother Esther, as was every eldest female member of her family going back to the Middle Ages. Each generation is marked by a uniquely obscure disease, illness, or ailment--one of her ancestors was patient zero in the sixteenth-century dancing plague of Strasbourg, while Esther has a degenerative eye disease. Ninon grows up comforted and fascinated by the recitation of these bizarre, inexplicable medical mysteries, forewarned that something will happen to her, yet entirely unprepared for how it will alter her life. Her own entry into this litany of maladies appears one morning in the form of an excruciating burning sensation on her skin, from her wrists to her shoulders.</p><p>Embarking on a dizzying and frustrating cycle of doctors, specialists, procedures, needles, scans, and therapists, seventeen-year-old Ninon becomes consumed by her need to receive a diagnosis and find a cure for her ailment. She seeks to break the curse and reclaim her body by any means necessary, through increasing isolation and failed treatment after failed treatment, even as her life falls apart. A provocative and empathic questioning of illness, remedy, transmission, and health, <i>Life Sciences</i> poignantly questions our reliance upon science, despite its limitations, to provide all the answers. </p><p/><br></br><p><b> Review Quotes </b></p></br></br><br><p>"Sorman uses her protagonist's suffering to critique the medical establishment, with its massive imbalance of power between doctor and patient.... Her detached tone, which Lara Vergnaud makes crisp and stylized, adds to the sense of novel-as-critique: often, Sorman's narrator seems to be speaking in voiceover, as if Ninon were the subject of a documentary. This strategy serves to alienate the reader from Ninon, precisely as Ninon's pain alienates her from her mother and from her peers. <i>Life Sciences</i> is a lonely book--and, for that reason, an effective one.... It forces the reader to reckon with what Ninon is going through."</p><p><b>--Lily Meyer, NPR</b></p><br><br><p>"An arresting allegory.... [Ninon's] determination to jump 'out of the line of cursed, mad, degenerate women' makes her an engaging character as well as a powerful cipher of resistance to the stories she's grown up with.... Readers will feel empowered by this tale of taking control of one's body."</p><p><b><i>--Publishers Weekly</i></b></p><p></p><br><br><p>"When a French teenager inherits a painful curse, ordinary life ends and a quest for healing begins.... The second novel from Sorman, a prizewinning novelist based in Paris, comes to us in a beautiful translation by Vergnaud.... [T]he ending is worth getting to."</p><p><b><i>--Kirkus Reviews</i></b></p><p></p><br><br><p>"It's an often dark tale about women who struggle with health issues that the medical establishment cannot--or does not want to--cure, or even identify. But stories can be changed, and Ninon might just be the woman to do it. <i>Life Sciences</i> is an immersive, harrowing novel about the power of stories to turn a captivating fable into a prophecy."</p><p><b>--Eileen Gonzalez, <i>Foreword Reviews</i></b></p><br>
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