The Fourth Child by Jessica Winter

Jessica Winter’s The Fourth Child begins with an epitaph from Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child, a work of domestic horror in which a supernaturally unlovable fifth child disturbs the happy equilibrium of a complacent family. The difficulties of the fourth child that are introduced in The Fourth Child are neither supernatural nor entirely unlovable, but this child does disrupt the balance of the family into which she’s adopted, causing the mother, Jane, who has removed her new daughter from a bleak and somewhat murky existence in a Eastern European orphanage, to question the dimensions of her supposedly altruistic act. (Her family is faster to query Jane’s motivations.) Jane is a do-gooder, a devout Catholic and accidental anti-abortion activist raising her three biological children and one unruly orphan adoptee in upstate New York in the early ’90s. As those specific markers imply, this is a work of precise social realism, in which the intricate tableau of detail offers a backdrop for larger questions about morality, family, and obligation