Coming to Terms: A Literary Response to Abortion Book

I've had this book unread on my shelves since 2006 when I bought it in paperback, but came back to it recently when I was reminded of it in a Pete Hamill interview I read at the back of his Downtown memoir.

Set primarily within the walls of Echo Terrace, a residential building close to World Trade Plaza in Downtown Manhattan, Between Two Rivers details episodes in the lives of several of its residents and employees, sometimes interweaving their narratives. With NYC being such a varied city population wise, this allows for many different tales to be told. Within these narratives, the wider human experiences of first the 1993 and later the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center are also portrayed.

I have to admit that this book disappointed me a little, and took me nearly 3 weeks to get through, albeit 3 very busy weeks when I also read other books. The fact was, that I wasn't engaged enough to rush back to read on. I found many of the residents' and employees' stories fantastical and implausible, and was annoyed that certain aspects of the overall narrative were left unresolved at the conclusion.

The strong point of the novel was the author's portrayal of the human experience of the two different attacks on the WTC. To be honest, I knew little about the 1993 attack before reading the book, but having researched it subsequent to reading the section in the novel, Rinaldi has mixed factual information very effectively with eyewitness experience. He has also managed to capture the devastation of the 9/11 attacks, and the terrible human suffering of that day without being crass or sensational. It was these sections of the book that earned the third star in my eyes.

With 506 pages in my edition , I invested a lot of time in Rinaldi's narrative, but to be honest, unless you are a fan of his work, I could recommend a plethora of similar themed novels that I'd read before this one.