Reviews with content warning for Pandemic/Epidemic - Reproduction

Reviews tagging 'Pandemic/Epidemic'

playfulplatypus's review

emotional hopeful reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No

3.75

I’ll start by saying that I don’t think I was the target audience for this book, so I understand that likely shapes my feelings about it. I enjoyed this read and even learned some things about pregnancy and the challenges therein. It was deeply reflective and provided some poignant thoughts on the particular pains someone with a uterus may face. Still, with all of the deep excavation of feelings and perspectives, I never felt like I really got to understand our main character’s driving motivation and that made me feel a degree of disconnection from her struggle.

Seriously, after so much trauma, why not go a different route? Adoption? Surrogacy, if the genetics are the real issue? Yes, these are expensive but so are repeated procedures to deal with failed pregnancies. Not to mention the risk of death and leaving her daughter without a mother. In the end, it seems she came to peace with the size of her family and let go of striving for more, so that was comforting.

Side note: I would love to read a story with Anna as the main character. That woman is fascinating and mysterious.

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carriepond's review

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challenging reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.5

The unnamed narrator in Louisa Hall's Reproduction tells us in the novel's opening sentence: "I began work on a novel about Mary Shelley in 2018, when I was pregnant for the first time." From this opening, a plot that is about that but not about that at all unfolds, mostly focused on the narrator's experiences with pregnancy, pregnancy loss, traumatic birth, and motherhood.

I read an article that Hall wrote about Reproduction and how she was inspired by her own experiences with being pregnant and giving birth. She described how, as she did in most seasons of her life, she turned to literature to help her process her experiences, only to find a shortage of literature that represented the experience of giving birth. The only book she found that matched the intensity of her experience was the classic horror novel Frankenstein, whose creator Mary Shelley experienced multiple miscarriages and the loss of several children.

As someone who has had many of the same experiences as Hall and her unnamed narrator, the experience of reading so much of what I have been through, perfectly put, was worth the read alone.

For example:

"[T]he awareness of my inability to describe what I was feeling only served to compound the helplessness of the experience, so that, even in the minutes between contractions, minutes when I wasn't in pain, I lay there in the living room, and felt as though I'd been exiled to a new kind of aloneness."

And another:

"And, indeed, speaking of dogs: sometimes when the contraction had passed, and my husband had sunk back into his chair in utter stupefied blankness, I'd look at him in pure fury and think that the dog, at home, had been more helpful. I'd wish it was the dog who had come with me: the dog who did not try to help, who did not try to do anything to alleviate my suffering, but only huddled there with me, his whole body trembling. His was the species to which I now belonged. Or so I thought, as the contractions subsided, and my husband returned to his armchair and rested."

I also really enjoyed the narrator's descriptions of the dissonance that is parenting during tumultuous times-- the unmitigated joy of watching a person become, at times intermingled with and at other times completely obscuring, the anxiety and fear of being a person in the current world. "Far away," Hall writes, "there were murder and disease and rising tide lines, but in our backyard, our daughter was crawling." The science fiction elements of the novel that deal with genetic engineering, both generally and in the context of pregnancy, were interesting to me as well. I also really enjoyed how the novel kept the parallels with Frankenstein in interesting ways (and now I want to go read Frankenstein).

I loved this book. If my little aside above about Hall's inspiration sounds interesting to you, you should read this. If you like overtly feminist ruminations on motherhood, pregnancy, the body, selfhood, and creation in its many forms, you should read this. If you go into this book looking for a linear plot or action, you will be disappointed.

Content Warnings

chelford's review against another edition

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4.0

My review of this might change with more time to ruminate on it, but for now, while it's still fresh, I'm not sure I really connected to this book by the end of it. The first half was absolutely enthralling, and I had to take a break to cry more than once. The body horror of pregnancy and loss is vividly depicted. I nearly stopped reading with the skip to 2021, expecting a very different route. I'm relieved it didn't go the way I was thinking, but the whole Anna plot line seemed tertiary to the MC's experiences, a clunky way to shoehorn in the Mary Shelley threads that had otherwise been dropped. However, this was presented to me as a horror novel in the vein of The Upstairs House, so maybe my expectations skewed my perception of the thing. Or maybe I just couldn't get over all the offhand discussion of vivisection. It's definitely one worth reading, but I was expecting it to be a new favorite, and it turned out to only be pretty good.

A note on the audio: the narrator was absolutely excellent.

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