Sign up for our newsletters to receive our Best of 2024 ezine!

Excerpt from A Better Angel by Chris Adrian, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Summary |  Excerpt |  Reviews |  Beyond the Book |  Readalikes |  Genres & Themes |  Author Bio

A Better Angel by Chris Adrian

A Better Angel

Stories

by Chris Adrian
  • BookBrowse Review:
  • Critics' Consensus (7):
  • Readers' Rating (2):
  • First Published:
  • Aug 5, 2008, 240 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Jul 2009, 304 pages
  • Rate this book

About this Book

Print Excerpt

white coat and a stethoscope and her hair done up in a smart bun, I asked her why she hadn’t warned me about the wasps. "I’m not that kind of angel," she said.

Though my father only ever knew a tenth of the trouble I’ve been in, I was still his least favorite child, and the last person he wanted taking care of him when he got very ill. But every one of my sisters was pregnant - one very much augmented and on purpose, and the other two accidents of fate. How they celebrated the coincidence, and then rued it when it forced them to bully me back to Florida from San Francisco. I was in clinic when they called, and it’s a testament to their power-of-three invincibility that they were able to blow through the phone tree and the two different receptionists who routinely deny my existence when patients try to find me. "Papa is sick," said Charlotte.

"He’s been sick," I said, because this had been going on for a year, and though nobody gets better from metastatic small-cell lung cancer, he’d been holding his own for months and months. "Papa is sicker," said Christine, and Carmen added, "Much sicker!" She is eldest and barely most pregnant.

"He’s in the hospital," said Christine. "There’s an infection." "In his bladder," said Charlotte. There are two years between each of them but they’ve always seemed like triplets, all of them looking the same age with their furrowed brows and disapproving hatchet mouths, all as tall and light as I am short and dark, all with the same blue eyes that seem just the right color to stare a person down with. My eyes, like my father’s, are nearly black, and Carmen says I can hide anything in them.

"A little cystitis," I said. "So what?"

"Dr. Klar says he’s very ill," said Christine.

"She doesn’t know if he’ll come out of the hospital," said Charlotte.

"She always says that," I said. "She never knows. She’s an alarmist. She’s a worrier."

"You have to go!" they said all together.

"You have to go," I said. "You go if it matters so much."

"We’re pregnant!" they said. And then the individual excuses: mild preeclampsia for Charlotte and Christine and a clotty calf for Carmen. They can’t travel from New York, where they all live within waddling distance of each other.

"People travel when they’re eight months pregnant," I said.

"People do it all the time!" Though I knew that they don’t, and now the angel was sitting on my desk and shaking her head at me.

"You’re a doctor," they said all together, as if that should settle it, and I wanted to say I’m impaired, and a pediatrician to boot. I could have confessed it right then, to them and to the whole world: I am an impaired physician, and then started down the yellow brick road to rehab.

Instead I quietly hung up on them. The angel was still shaking her head at me. She was dressed to shock, with a plastic shopping bag on her head, in a filthy housedress, and with a dead cat wrapped around either foot.

  • 1

From A Better Angel by Chris Adrian, to be published in August by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2008 by Chris Adrian. All rights reserved.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket
    The Frozen River
    by Ariel Lawhon
    "I cannot say why it is so important that I make this daily record. Perhaps because I have been ...
  • Book Jacket
    Prophet Song
    by Paul Lynch
    Paul Lynch's 2023 Booker Prize–winning Prophet Song is a speedboat of a novel that hurtles...
  • Book Jacket: The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern
    The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern
    by Lynda Cohen Loigman
    Lynda Cohen Loigman's delightful novel The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern opens in 1987. The titular ...
  • Book Jacket: Small Rain
    Small Rain
    by Garth Greenwell
    At the beginning of Garth Greenwell's novel Small Rain, the protagonist, an unnamed poet in his ...

BookBrowse Book Club

Book Jacket
The Berry Pickers
by Amanda Peters
A four-year-old Mi'kmaq girl disappears, leaving a mystery unsolved for fifty years.
Book Jacket
The Story Collector
by Evie Woods
From the international bestselling author of The Lost Bookshop!
Who Said...

Harvard is the storehouse of knowledge because the freshmen bring so much in and the graduates take so little out.

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Big Holiday Wordplay 2024

Enter Now

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.