The Opposite of Fate

The Opposite of Fate by Alison McGhee (2020) 265 pages

Mallie, a young massage therapist whose father is dead and who is estranged from her uber-religious mother, lives with her boyfriend and her teen-aged brother. One rainy night, while waiting to pick up her brother from a party, she is raped and assaulted and left comatose and pregnant. A whole array of people weighs in, including her mother's church community and neighbors who are Mallie's family-in-spirit. They fight not only for Mallie's life, but for or against abortion of the fetus sired by her rapist. When Mallie awakens from her coma sixteen months after the assault, the processing begins.  The book's imagery is compelling and poetic. The story is told from alternating points of view, mostly from Mallie and her neighbor, William T.

One measure of a great book is how much it grabs you from the time you first see the description by the publisher, and how it continues to haunt you each time you set the book down or try to sleep, and how it still consumes you after you've read the last page. For me, this is one of those books.