Sara's Laughter
Tom Milton, 2011
Nepperhan Press
186 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780982990445
Summary
Despite warnings from her mother that if she waited too long to get married she wouldn't be able to find a husband, Sara waited until she found the right man.
But now Sara is thirty-five and she is having trouble getting pregnant. She has tried everything except technologies that are not approved by her religion. Under pressure from her widowed father to give him a grandson, she is tempted to try anything, but she keeps hoping for a miracle.
Her hope is kept alive by a dream in which God told her husband she would have a baby. When her sister Becky, who doesn’t want to have children, gets pregnant accidentally from an extramarital fling, Sara comes up with a solution that would finally make her dream come true. But when things don’t go according to plan she loses her way, and she discovers a side of her nature she never imagined. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—April 3, 1949
• Where—St. Paul, Minnesota, USA
• Education—B.A. Princeton University; M.A., University
of Iowa (Writers Workshop); Ph.D., Walden University
• Currently—lives in Hastings-on-Hudson, NY
Tom Milton was born and raised in St. Paul, Minnesota. After completing his undergraduate
degree at Princeton he worked for the Wall Street Journal, and then he was invited to the Writers Workshop in Iowa City, where he completed a novel and a master’s degree. He then served in the U.S. Army, and upon his discharge he joined a major international bank in New York. For the next twenty years he worked overseas, initially as an economic/political analyst and finally as a senior executive. He later became involved in economic development projects.
After retiring from his business career he joined the faculty of Mercy College, where he is a professor of international business. Five years ago he found a publisher for his novels, some of which are set in foreign cities where he lived (Buenos Aires, London, Madrid, and Santo Domingo). His novels are popular with reading groups because they deal with major issues, they have engaging characters, and they are good stories.
His first published novel, No Way to Peace, set in Argentina in the mid-1970s, is about the courage of five women during that country’s war of terror. His second novel, The Admiral’s Daughter, is about the conflict between a young woman and her father during the civil rights war in Mississippi in the early 1960s. His third novel, All the Flowers, set in New York in the late 1960s, is about a gifted young singer who gets involved in the antiwar movement because her twin brother joins the army to prove his manhood to his father. His fourth novel, Infamy, set in Madrid in 2007, is about the attempt of security agents to stop a terrorist attack on New York City that would use weapons of mass destruction. His next novel, A Shower of Roses, set in London in the early 1980s, is about a young nurse who is drawn by love into an intrigue of the Cold War. His next novel, Sara’s Laughter, set in Yonkers, NY in 1993, is about a woman in her mid-thirties who wants a child but is unable to get pregnant. And his latest novel, The Golden Door, is about a young Latina woman in Alabama whose future is threatened by a harsh anti-immigrant law that the state passed in 2011. (From the author.)
Book Reviews
On learning that, though elderly and barren, she’d finally have the child promised to her all those years ago, the Biblical matriarch, Sarah, laughs, surreptitiously. Whether read as a bitter or joyous, nervous or skeptical, it’s in Sarah’s laughter that many have searched for guidance when life fails to deliver on cherished dreams. Taking this Old Testament lesson as inspiration, Sara’s Laughter explores the compromises contemporary Catholics make in an attempt to reconcile the restrictions of their faith WITH the technological advances that make reproductive dreams a possibility. Although Sara, a good “Bronx Irish Catholic,” can’t escape the “voices” of her parents in her head, she resists the pressure to marry right after college and produce a grandson. Instead, she holds out for Mr. Right: Marcelo Solis, a Latino doctor who foregoes lucrative private practice to work at a clinic in the Bronx. However, after overcoming doubt and mistrust early in their relationship, and her father’s reservations about their mixed-race marriage, Sara and Marcelo find themselves facing a new challenge when Sara learns she’s all but infertile. Having already stepped outside the bounds of her faith as a single woman living in Manhattan (pre-marital sex, birth control), Sara must decide how far she’s willing to go “over the line” set by the doctrine of Humanae Vitae in order to have the family she so desperately wants. But when Sara’s troubled sister, Becky, calls, devastated, with news of her own unplanned pregnancy, Sara, misled by her own sense of entitlement (“Well, don’t you think we’d make better parents?”), accepts Becky’s promise to give her the child heedless of the repercussions: while Sara is “born with self-esteem,” Becky is not, and Sara knows Becky’s resentment won’t allow her to give her the one thing she wants. While Milton’s tour of Catholic reproduction issues— birth control, surrogacy, in vitro fertilization, abortion—is laudably balanced, the treatment is too cursory and the ending too pat to be of much philosophical interest. Similarly, the doctrine of Humanae Vitae is prodded far too gently to appeal to skeptics or those interested in serious philosophical challenges to the doctrine. Regardless, Milton, author of five novels, including Infamy and The Admiral’s Daughter, is a talented storyteller who has real sympathy for his characters, and the result is an honest tale about relationships—the vicissitudes, the frustrations, the solace—and the enduring power of familial love. .
Devon Shepherd - Foreword Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. To what extent is Sara influenced by the voice of her mother in her head?
2. What’s the difference between the messages Sara gets from her mother and her father about her inability to get pregnant?
3. What issues does Sara confront as she uses the technology available to women who have fertility problems?
4. Evaluate the advice that Sara gets from Dr. Vesely.
5. How would you describe Sara’s relationship with her mother?
6. Does Sara achieve separation from her mother?
7. Sara’s sister accuses her of being daddy’s little girl. Is this a valid accusation?
8. Why is Marcelo the right man for Sara?
9. Marcelo has two complications: he is married, and he isn’t white. Which complication is harder for Sara’s mother to deal with? What does that tell us about her mother?
10. How deep do you think her father’s racism is?
11. Would Becky have been a different person if she had been an only child?
12. Explain Becky’s behavior after she got pregnant.
13. What do you think of Sara’s solution to her sister’s problem?
14. What perspectives do we gain from Sara’s conversations at lunch with her friend Regina?
15. What perspectives do we gain from Sara’s conversations with Father Paul in front of St. Brigid?
16. How does Sara’s view of the local abortion clinic evolve during the story?
17. Would Sara have joined the protesters in front of the clinic solely as a matter of principle?
18. Why is Sara mesmerized by Brother Jeremiah?
19. What did Sara and Becky learn about themselves that changed their relationship?
(Questions issued by the author.)