He Gets That from Me: A Novel
About this ebook
A 2021 Kirkus Reviews' Best Indie Book of the Year
2021 Reader's Favorite: Gold Medal, Fiction
SheReads 2021 Book Awards: Best Book Club Pick
“It is hard to imagine a better novel for a book club discussion...A thoughtful and gripping family tale that will haunt readers long after finishing it.”
—Kirkus Reviews, STARRED
“...a touching and provocative novel about the collisions of the emotional and legal meanings of family.”
—Foreword Reviews
As a young mother with a toddler and a live-in boyfriend, Maggie Fisher’s job at a checkout counter in downtown Phoenix doesn’t afford her much financial flexibility. She dreams of going to college and becoming a teacher, options she squandered when she fled her family home as a teenager. When Maggie stumbles onto an ad offering thousands of dollars to women who are willing to gestate other people’s babies, she at first finds the concept laughable. Before long, however, she’s been seduced by all the ways the extra money could improve her life. Once she decides to go for it, it’s only a matter of months before she’s chosen as a gestational carrier by Chip and Donovan Rigsdale, a married couple from New York.
After delivering twin babies and proudly handing them off to the Rigsdales, Maggie finally gets her life on a positive trajectory: she earns her degree, lands a great job, and builds a family of her own. She can’t fathom why, ten years after the fact, the fertility clinic is calling to ask for a follow-up DNA test.
High-energy and immensely readable, He Gets That from Me explores what it really means to be part of a family.
Ratings and reviews
About the author
Jacqueline Friedland is the author of the award-winning novels Trouble the Water and That’s Not a Thing. She holds a BA from the University of Pennsylvania and a JD from NYU Law School. She practiced as an attorney in New York for a hot second before transitioning to writing full time. She lives in New York with her husband, four children, and two very bossy dogs.
