I won’t pretend to know anything about childbirth. I know it happened to me, in so far that I didn’t care to leave my mother’s womb on time and so they had to wrench me out via incision, eliminating the possibility of a pleasant gondola ride down the birth canal for me. None too soon, either, considering I was “the biggest baby they ever saw” according to one awestruck nurse, and if I waited much longer I may have gained so much mass that an escape out of my mother would be nigh impossible. That being said, Elisa Albert’s new novel After Birth gives tons of insight into the mind of a new mother. Not just any new mother, either; Albert’s protagonist Ari has one of the most distinct, caustic, and engaging narratorial voices in recent memory. She navigates the world of motherhood and sisterhood with scorching insight, attempting to figure out what keeps women emotionally divided between each other, and whether or not she even cares that much for women, anyway. After Birth is hilarious, pregnant with acerbic barbs on everything from milk formula to Nazi joy divisions. Yeah, it goes there.