BookBrowse Reviews The Nine Lives of Rose Napolitano by Donna Freitas

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In her debut novel for adults, The Nine Lives of Rose Napolitano, Donna Freitas takes an unflinching look at marriage, motherhood and fate.

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Donna Freitas has published novels for teens as well as nonfiction works of memoir and social commentary for adults. Now, in her first novel for adults, she gives her audience sophisticated themes of marriage and motherhood, enveloped in an equally sophisticated structure.

As the novel's title suggests, Freitas presents nine versions of a woman's life. Each is introduced with the same scenario: Rose Napolitano is confronted by her husband, Luke, who has just realized that she's been lying about taking her prenatal vitamins. Rose isn't pregnant (yet); the vitamins are a compromise, a prelude to what Luke hopes will result in a decision to try for a child. When Rose and Luke first met—him a photographer, her a sociology student—they shared a desire to remain child-free. In the intervening years, however, Luke (who has, in most versions of this life, achieved less career success than Rose) has changed his tune and is trying to drag Rose, kicking and screaming, into parenthood alongside him.

In addition to being a reflection on the complexities of relationships, Freitas's novel is an elegant exploration of what might be called fate. Rose's various responses to Luke's outrage—from anger to withdrawal to resignation—result in vastly different outcomes, at least to begin with. In some versions of Rose's future, she gives birth to a beloved child; in others, she doesn't. In some, there's infidelity on the part of one character; in others, it happens on both sides of the relationship. Some versions end in tragedy, others in joy—but they all share certain patterns and people, whose intersections with Rose shape each story regardless of the choices that set the different configurations of her existence in motion.

Freitas also goes back in time, before the prenatal vitamin incident, and before Rose's life began to split and fracture into those different choices and consequences. Through this structure, readers have the opportunity to trace the origins and evolution of Rose and Luke's relationship as well as Rose's ever-changing self-perception.

While exploring Rose's attitudes toward her potential future(s) as a mother, The Nine Lives of Rose Napolitano examines her relationship with her own mother and the identities of women in general. Rose's role as a daughter comes to affect the way she conceives of her other identities, such as her professional role as a sociologist—an occupation Freitas, whose background is in sociology and religious studies, knows something about. Rose's personal life inspires and informs her research, and her academic knowledge affects how she understands and analyzes the patterns of her life and those of women like her.

In one of her lives, Rose reflects, "This question of motherhood, of if I will become one, and if so when, and what if I don't become one, then what, all of them intimately laced into who I am as a woman." Readers who have grappled with these questions will see themselves in at least one of her lives, and book clubs will inevitably enjoy both debating Rose's choices and dissecting the ways in which Freitas skillfully structures all of those lives into a moving, powerful whole.

This review first ran in the May 19, 2021 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.