Ark Angels —Myla Goldberg, New York Times Book Review Published: October 15, 2006
Adrian’s work is preoccupied with age-old questions: he wants to know why people die, what meaning can be divined from their lives and their ends, and whether anything lies beyond. In “The Children’s Hospital” these issues express themselves most eloquently through Jemma, whose existence before the flood was transformed by the singular life and violent suicide of her brother, Calvin. Calvin is one of several angels who guide this book to its conclusion, angels who serve not only as dei ex machinis inside the hospital but who, in alternating voices, tell the novel’s story.
The book’s alternating angelic narrators muddy the waters of a story that could have been told more simply and effectively in traditional third person neh I like the angelic interludes — which it feels like most of the time, until an angel interrupts. I did not think the long chapters were note angles. that the fishes were a symbol for "at sea" and the grid square for "on land" - re moments from Jemma's past. while the knives were Ishmael at first I thought Calvin. and the feather pens the recording angel who I thought was female but calls itself brother. ?? or maybe it does not, maybe that was the voice in the fishes sections? bcs there seem to be 'sisters' - who is the other girl besides the hospital angel of preservation? and is Calvin the recording angel? but on p1 that angel says Calvin burned brightly bcs knew his story by heart - perhaps cld be self, but odd. One needs to resort to the pictograms heading each section to discern one angelic voice from another. I am not sure that each is distinct, but seems sloppy if the four pictograms do not correspond to four angels. but?? Ishmael is the accuser. and there is the recorder. and there is the hospital angel of preservation. and a destroyer? "It takes four angels to oversee an apocalypse: one to preserve, one to record, one to accuse, one to destroy." and Calvin is one of them, the destroyer?
it is not fitting together for me....


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