The Atonement Child

(Here I present a precise summary of the novel “The Atonement Child” by an American author Francine Rivers. It is the summary which I wrote for my Master’s thesis concerning the novel and for one of my research articles.)

Summary of the novel The Atonement Child

Francine Rivers is an American Christian novelist. Her 1997 realistic novel The Atonement Child deals with serious ethical questions surrounding the justification of abortion, and demonstrates its moral-psychological effects upon the individual and their family.

Dynah Carey is the central character in the novel. She comes from an American Christian family that consists of her loving parents, Hannah Carey and Douglas Carey, and her strong-willed grandmother, Evie Daniels, who lives by herself. She has been brought up well in Christian beliefs and ethics. Her mother Hannah is deeply religious. She has always taught Dynah that abortion is wrong and forbidden by God, and this knowledge has ingrained deep in Dynah’s consciousness. In the beginning of the novel she is a young girl studying at a Bible college, and working in a local manor house during evenings as a part time job. She is beautiful, disciplined, obedient to her parents and faithful to her God. She is also engaged to a wonderful Christian guy, Ethan Goodson Turner, who is studying in senior class at the same college and is training himself to be a Pastor in near future. Dynah’s life seems happy and her future very promising.

Then, all of a sudden, her perfect life gets shattered one night when Dynah gets raped by an unidentified man while returning from her job. The resulting pregnancy and reactions from her family and friends try to shatter her life and faith in the Christian ideals. Abortion that she and the people around her hated so much now seems to be the only available solution out of the problem. Her pro-life fiancé Ethan suddenly finds abortion acceptable as the only way out of the mess, her pro-life college threatens to expel her unless she gets rid of her pregnancy, and her family gets divided between her parents (father and mother) forcing an abortion and her grandmother strongly resisting it.

In the course of growing tension and attempts to resolve it, Dynah’s mother Hannah is known to have had abortion herself that made her incapable of having children for several years until Dynah was finally born. She had to abort her baby to escape from social shame after her lover impregnated and then abandoned her. Dynah’s grandmother, Evie, also reveals that she was forced to have an abortion for health reasons. She had had therapeutic abortion. According to her, she was suffering from tuberculosis during her pregnancy and the doctor told her husband, Frank, that she wouldn’t survive another child. So, in order to save Evie’s life Frank pressed her to have abortion. Evie was already five months along and the baby was a boy. Reluctantly, she aborted the baby.

Dynah finally leaves her home in order to keep her family away from further tension and find the solution to her problem on her own. Though Joseph Gullierno, a good friend of her, tries to come to her aid, she chooses to struggle all alone, and slowly finds rest and peace in ‘God’s Words,’ the Holy Bible, and prayer. Consoled and guided by the Words of the Bible, she eventually decides to give birth to the baby and then give it up for adoption. But, once she sees and holds the baby girl in her hands, she cannot give her up, and instead, feels that God wants her to keep the baby. So, she decides to keep the baby and rear it herself.

Dynah suffers not for her own sins but that of her mother Hannah who sinned by committing abortion. She is now “the atonement child” of her mother. Her own newly born child is “the atonement child” who has taken birth to atone for the sins of abortion that were secretly running down the generations in her family.