A review by rieviolet
The Natural Mother of the Child by Krys Malcolm Belc

challenging emotional reflective medium-paced

3.5

I think I went into this book with a lot of pre-made assumptions and expectations that weren't really met. But I recognize that this is all on me the reader as I expected to find reflected a lot of my own feelings and experiences about being non-binary and the concept of motherhood/parenthood and so I cannot really put any blame on the book itself. Still, the reading experience, for me at least, fell a bit flat, aside from some really interesting, reflective and emotional passages, but they were few and far between. 

There were times I struggled a bit with the prose, it felt a bit fragmented, jumpy and fast, with very short sentences or with sentences lacking punctuation. I don't think that I personally get on well with this kind of writing style, sometimes I struggled to follow the structure of the sentence.
At times, I also felt that the story telling was a bit disjointed and there were many segments expanding on related topics that, nevertheless, I found a bit boring and that took me out of the main narration. For example, there were digressions on the ultrasound technology, on other scientific or medical topics that I did not expected and just did not care much for. 

I'm still glad to have read the book as I'm always keen to read more about queerness in all its forms. I just struggled a bit to get thorugh the book and did not get out of it as much as I was expecting. 

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