Are You Mine?
by By Frucht, Abby
Category: Fiction , General

Cara and Douglas, a young married couple in the Midwest, are on a reproductive adventure, a journey through love, physical intimacy, childbirth, abortion, and birth control. "A body's all you have to get through life in," declares the impulsive, loving Cara, finding herself pregnant for a third time. Not at all sure she wants another child, she's already in love with this child, and her relationship with her unborn baby takes on the dimensions of an affair; their rapport, in the intimate space of her own body, begins to exclude her husband and her other children.Cara finds herself questioning abortion with a startling lack of bias - social, political, or religious. She must decide between disrupting the balance of her established family and her own life, and saying goodbye to a person who will never sit at her dinner table or play with her other children. Cara's spirited grappling with these problems counterpoints Douglas's compassionate analysis as they alternate between being the couple that is their marriage, and being two separate people in two separate bodies and sexes.At once a romance and a comedy of passion, Are You Mine? is an intimate map of the obstacle course of life's choices, a set of hurdles and predicaments so fraught with complication that every woman must negotiate it according to her own needs, circumstances, and desires. By the end of the book, Cara and Douglas, parents and lovers in the middle of America, have achieved an understanding that is at once amusing and troubling, but that is based above all on an affirmation of their own integrity.