Imaginative, compelling and very well written. I was drawn into the story, and the medical aspects really kept me interested. I've never read a story like this before. I love it! ( )

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 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. ( )

The Children's Hospital is a big read, but one well worth the effort. Adrain has created a complex, challenging and beautiful world, inhabited by a tremendous group of lovably flawed characters. While the book does drag a little bit in the middle sections, I found myself really wanting to know what happened, and I couldn't put it down. I particularly recommend it for people in the medical field, as it really challenged me to think about the nature and goals of medical treatment. Highly recommended.

http://thebookwormslibrary.com/?p=100... ( )

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 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. ( )