The Children's Hospital

The Children’s Hospital is a book that asks a lot of its readers. It begins with the Earth being flooded under seven miles of water, and the only surviving ark is literally a children’s hospital, kept afloat by a preserving angel, who also adds new rooms, replicators that can provide anything

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the survivors need and ghostly, uncomforting intonations of comfort that emanate from the PA system, floors and walls. There are three other angels as well, although they are not revealed to most of the hospital’s inhabitants: the recording angel, who is the book’s invisible narrator; the accusing angel; and the destroying angel, whose ominous title is well-deserved. The hospital’s Noah is a medical student named Jemma, who discovers she has the power to heal all of the young passengers’ horrendous diseases and afflictions, and that she is pregnant with the post-apocalypse’s first baby.

Thus, this is the Flood and the Messiah and the Armageddon stories all rolled up into one, and it all would be a bit much if not for Adrian’s deft use of language. In the 600 or so pages of this dense novel, he evokes an otherwordly, magical atmosphere that slowly and seductively lures the reader in and suspends that disbelief up high. Despite the bureaucratic quibblings of the hospital staff that persist even in the End Times, this is not a story that is meant to be taken literally. It is allegory and mythology, plain and simple, so don’t spend too much time wondering about those replicators.

In fact, the allusions and references of The Children’s Hospital are so densely packed I won’t attempt to enumerate them, but only encourage you to read the book and discover them for yourself, and to stick with it for a while after the point where you want to give up. The Children’s Hospital takes its time in weaving its spell, and if my only quibble with it is that it probably could have used some judicious editing, it’s a mild quibble.

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Beautifully imagined, well-written and very provocative. However, this book finally collapsed under its own weight. It's just too long and too busy. It could have accomplished more if it had been at least 100 pages shorter.

An inventive and original book, it starts out strong and then wavers near the end. I confess, for the final hundred pages I was beginning to get bored, and wanted the author to hurry up and finish it so I could see if he redeemed himself. He didn't, sadly, but it is still worth reading. If you

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enjoy this, you might also like the early work of James Morrow.

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one of those high-brow metaphor type books, that uses the post-apocalypse bit as a plot device. Well written, but a highly disappointing ending...

For the first fifty pages I was interested and excited about this, the prose was excellent, the premise was interesting, I was eager to see where he was going with it. For the next two hundred pages I was increasingly irritated as it became apparent that he was not going much of anywhere. Then I

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skimmed for awhile. Then I threw it across the room and gave up.

I just... come on, you find yourself trapped in a hospital that appears to have turned into a magical ark filled with the sole survivors of a second flood, complete with replicators that will give you anything you ask for. A voice speaks to you out of the walls, the hospital appears to be moving, whole floors and corridors have appeared that weren't there before. These are not spoilers, all of this happens before the book begins and is covered in the first few pages.

In response to this fairly shattering occurance the whole cast of characters just shrugs and goes on about their daily routines pretty much as if nothing at all had happened. They do their jobs, complain about their bosses, have uninteresting sex with their co workers, get sprayed with various bodily fluids by the sick children, sigh and change their scrubs, grab some bad coffee from the replicator and do their jobs, complain about their bosses, have uninteresting sex with their co workers, get sprayed with various bodily fluids by the sick children, sigh and change their scrubs. For hundreds and hundreds of pages.

These are the most unimaginative people I've ever met. There are REPLICATORS in the walls! They could be replicating boats to go exploring, they could be replicating new drugs for the kids, they could be replicating floor scrubbing robots or telescopes or dresses made of diamonds in which to go dancing. But they just ask for coffee and danish and a new set of scrubs and go on trudging through their routines. Its absurd. By the time things start to happen I've ceased to care. The book wore out its welcome with me.

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This book was a great example of magical realism executed extraordinarily well.

True, the tale does drag from time to time and the cast of characters is so large it is sometimes hard to manage--though that doesn't end up mattering too much anyway by the end. I thought the story was overall very

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engaging and its constructs innovative. I totally understand why the folks at McSweeney's were excited about this one--even enough to include the first chaper in Issue 20. That alone should tell you something.

I don't want to tell you too much and ruin Mr. Adrian's well constructed plot so I'll just leave it at that...and tell you I recommend it, without reservation.

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I can't bring myself to recommend a 600-page book that loses so much momentum after the first half. One day, God sends a second flood to destroy all life on earth, except for the inhabitants of a children's hospital full of a Catch-22-like cast of hyper-quirky adults and surreally ill children. As

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the ark floats through an almost entirely deserted world, the inhabitants are left to ponder ethical social and spiritual questions, to wonder how we lost our way and what the new world will be like. We follow a struggling medical student named Jemma who is granted amazing but unpredictable healing powers as she tries to turn the job she can barely stand into her entire life, and also visit her as a child and learn how she became as emotionally distant and strained as she is now. In these sections we get to see her older brother, who believed he was a prophet of doom with an abominable destiny. These sections are narrated by a semi omniscient narrator whose personality and identity gradually seep through into the text. Other sections are narrated in close first person by two angels, one cursed to watch over the hospital and another to eventually destroy it. My disappointment with the novel comes from the way it constantly spreads outwards, getting broader and broader, instead of going forward. Jemma never shows much individuality beyond her general oddness, and as much as we apparently get inside the head of her prophet-lunatic brother, we never really learn much about who he is or what he believes. None of the wildly entertaining characters ever become really human or relatable. every authorial choice felt loaded with potential meaning, but few felt truly necessary, that they couldn't have happened any other way. In the novel, the characters perceive the hospital as floating at random through a deserted and endless ocean. As the novel progresses, they struggle with the necessity of believing that there is an invisible and perfect plan guiding their journey. This is wholly and utterly unsatisfying as a reader, because Adrian, brilliant and hard-working as he is, is not God. The fact that his novel has no apparent throughline may mean that I'm not wise or enlightened enough to see it. Or it may mean that Adrian had only begun to see the vision he had created by the time the book was published.

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Though this is one of the best books I've ever read, it isn't something I would recommend to most of my friends. After the first 300 pages it seems to drag on a bit, but once you get over the slump it really pays off. This book has given me more to think about than anything else I've read in the

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last five years.

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It feels like I have been reading this book for a month. Maybe that's true. It's long. And there are long passages of illness and committee formations in between a few major events. The detailed descriptions of medicine being practiced on children, while seemingly accurate, made me squeemy. (Nope,

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not going to be a nurse anytime soon.) And the overall violent apocolyptic people-are-beyond-saving thing was just too much doom for me right now. Have I mentioned how LONG it was? I wanted to like it, especially since it had been recommended by some good people and I put so much time into it, but in the end I was just relieved that it was finally over and I could read something else.

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I am almost to the end of this book and I would not suggest it to anyone. It is a very strange book and I am definitly not enjoying it. I am finishing it but only because I never stop reading a book once I get past about 4 chapters and the only reason I read that far into it was because I wanted it

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to be a good book because the back of the book sounded so good and I thought it must get better but it definitly didn't.

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A little tough to follow at points but a eerie and thought provoking novel.

The Children's Hospital by Chris Adrian has an interesting premise -- a hospital floats away a bit like Noah's Ark, preserving the occupants in a watery post-apocalyptic world. Unfortunately, though, I gave up after the first hundred pages. I found the plot too complicated and the writing too dense.

A book whose reach exceeds its grasp. So much about this book is wonderful, I commend Adrian for trying, really trying, to accomplish something marvelous. Although the book flounders, and eventually sinks upon the rocks of its authors triteness, the first half is so fantastic and beautifully

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imagined it's worth reading for that alone.

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One of my favorite novels I think. Hefty, with a wide, almost epic, scope. But with a strongly beating heart, and a narrow, almost claustrophobic focus on the protagonist Jemma. Lots of wonderful medical and Christian imagery. Angels narrate.

strange and inventive.

I finished this finally last week but didn't have an internet connection for almost a week so I probably don't have as much to say about it now. I wasn't really impressed with the book overall and I was very disappointed with many aspects of it. First, you must know that it's over 600 pages long

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and with all the books written out there for me to read, well, unless every page blows my mind then it's called an editor. Ok, second, it started out as something completely different than it ended up with. In the beginning, I thought it was going to be a great medical review of Children's Pathology as it actually does take place in a Children's Hospital. About 350-400 pages in, it goes all Chuck Palahniuk in a bad way on you but by that point you've felt that you've made such a time and emotional investment that it would be stupid to put it down now.


I think some of the book was interesting in a sort of modern mythology sense and as a plus, the main female character was very well developed. As a negative, it took the author way too long to make the points that he was trying to make and it was almost like he decided to change course of ideas and styles to go from medical to supernatural without enough basis in reality and without enough coherence. It's a shame, because I could have been reading about three other shorter books I'd enjoy more in that same amount of time.

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4.8 This book is both epic and mundane, an attempt to understand things from the detail and design. It is terrible and moving and funny and cruel. A great attempt and success. To read it you must be ready for 610 pages of tremendous grace and profanity. There is religion, science-fiction, bad

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things happening to children, graphic violence, and a wide variety of loves. You will not need first-hand experience with medical residency or UCSF, but it helps. Worth it for the names written inside the cover. One wonders what, if anything, Chris Adrian has left to say.

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I thoroughly enjoyed this book. and despite its length it kept my interest the whole way through. I initially wanted to read it as I love post apocalyptic stuff as a whole, but also that this was a different premise than the usual ones. there a lot of characters and it did take a little while to

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get them straight in my head, but with a book this size you can cope with that. the different choices narrating w were unusual and it kept up a fairly good pace, if one bit was less interesting it wasn't too long before something new happened.

overall I don't think I've read a book quite like it before and that's always a good thing in my mind.

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I thoroughly enjoyed this book. and despite its length it kept my interest the whole way through. I initially wanted to read it as I love post apocalyptic stuff as a whole, but also that this was a different premise than the usual ones. there a lot of characters and it did take a little while to

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get them straight in my head, but with a book this size you can cope with that. the different choices narrating w were unusual and it kept up a fairly good pace, if one bit was less interesting it wasn't too long before something new happened.

overall I don't think I've read a book quite like it before and that's always a good thing in my mind.

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