Girl in Glass

May 15, 2015
A first-person account of a woman who became a cause celebre following the grievous circumstances of her baby's birth. Novelist Fei (A Thread of Sky, 2010) grippingly details her dread, anxiety, and wonder with her second-trimester delivery, during which "the walls of [her] body gave way," and she palpably describes her baby's fragile condition-one doctor described the baby's skin as "gelatinous." Readers will be haunted by Fei's initial guilt and ambivalence as she recounts the months of "separation and agony and limbo" when her infant, who was less than 2 pounds at birth, received extraordinary, intensive care. The author calls her daughter's early arrival as "so wholly a catastrophe," as her conditions included a brain hemorrhage, respiratory distress syndrome, anemia, and jaundice. Later, when the family's hospital bills began to reach hundreds of thousands of dollars, Fei's second struggle commenced. Her husband and a colleague were cruelly castigated by their company's CEO, Tim Armstrong of AOL (who is worth more than $400 million), for necessitating the cuts in the company's retirement benefits due to the births of their "distressed babies...at a cost of one million dollars each." The author sensibly questions-and reasonably doubts-Armstrong's rationale that these unforeseen medical emergencies of his two employees were truly a hindrance to the company's bottom line. His contempt for two terribly fragile newborns and their families caused a national debate about corporate responsibility, compassion, and decency, and whether employers are obligated to provide workers with a "fiscally prudent health care plan." The book then becomes a treatise on "privacy rights" and the unauthorized buying and selling of patients' health data. Fei devotes much space to what she calls the "modern medical-industrial complex" and what some might regard as an overly long but informed discourse on the history of employer-provided health care. An urgent call for corporate compassion by a woman with a baby in peril.

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January 1, 2015
Fei's premature baby girl lived her first months on life support in a glass box. Then CEO Tim Armstrong blamed her hospital costs for a cut in AOL employee benefits. From the author of the novel "A Thread of Sky".

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2015
Novelist Fei (A Thread of Sky, 2010) makes a passionate case for why companies that pay their CEOs millions of dollars should not gripe about spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on preemies. She speaks from firsthand experience: the CEO of AOL, her husband's employer, publicly criticized the health-care money going to workers' distressed babies, which, though he did not mention her by name, included Fei's daughter. Little Mila arrived after just 25 weeks, weighing just one pound, nine ounces. The doctor tells her, Twenty years ago, this would have been a miscarriage. To give her baby the best shot at thriving, Fei not only breast pumps herself but even enlists her sister to express extra milk, too. At what would have been 38 weeks of gestation, Mila finally weighs five pounds, six ounces. Today, the million-dollar baby (who, Fei notes, actually cost more like $550,000) seems completely healthy, making her a poster child for why big health-care expenditures can sometimes pay off. Fei references statistics that convincingly show that neonatal-intensive-care-unit babies are a good investment.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

August 1, 2015

When she was only five months into her pregnancy, novelist Fei (A Thread of Sky) unexpectedly went into labor and delivered a one-pound baby girl who was not expected to live. Fei and her husband were told that if Mila survived she would be at risk for blindness, deafness, chronic lung disease, cerebral palsy, mental retardation, and the inability to lead an independent life. But Mila did live, and after a year in the NICU, she came home. What follows is a heartbreaking yet beautiful story of motherhood and love. When news headlines such as "AOL CEO Tim Armstrong blames benefit cuts on "distressed babies" began to surface, the term went viral. Armstrong's statement that AOL had to change its 401(k) benefits because two AOL families (Fei's husband worked for AOL) had "distressed babies," which cost the company a million dollars, became a launching pad for evaluating the bottom line in terms of the price of prematurity. Fei dedicates the last section of her book to this discussion, both personally and politically. While Armstrong apologized for his words and implications, the author outed herself as one of the mothers of the distressed babies and began a national conversation. VERDICT Fei is a gifted writer with a courageous tale to share. This memorable book belongs on the shelf of every library.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.