Reproduction A novel

Hall (Speak) delves into conception, pregnancy, and childbirth with the story of a writer, her friend, and Frankenstein author Mary Shelley. In 2018, the unnamed pregnant narrator moves from New York City to Montana with her husband. She has a miscarriage, and while working on a novel about Shelley, she becomes fixated on Shelley's horrifying experiences, including the death of her three young children and a near-fatal miscarriage. The narrator also reconnects with her old friend Anna, a scientist studying human genetic engineering. As Anna attempts to get pregnant via IVF and a sperm donor, the narrator incorporates Anna's story into her novel, as well as an account of her own miscarriage and increasingly nightmarish reproductive challenges during the early days of the pandemic. Hall's unconventional novel, thick with dreams, the narrator's pregnancy-induced nausea, and the dread induced by wildfires and Covid-19, offers visceral descriptions and striking insights (describing Anna, the narrator writes: "She'd felt like their monster: out of control of her own body. It had filled her with rage, which made her doubt her capacity to be a good mother. But she'd also been excited"). Graceful, precise, and perceptive, this is a memorable take on the danger and strangeness of pregnancy. (June)

The author of Trinity (2018) asks what Frankenstein can tell us about motherhood in the 21st century. "I began work on a novel about Mary Shelley in 2018, when I was pregnant for the first time." So begins this novel that is--obliquely--about Mary Shelley but is not that novel. If the previous sentence makes you wince or causes your eyes to roll out of your head, you probably will not enjoy the novel that is this novel. Same if you savor plot, action, and a rich cast of fully formed characters. If, however, a semiautobiographical, plainly feminist, sort of science-fiction exploration of what it means to create life sounds intriguing to you, read on. The unnamed narrator of this genre-defying book loses her pregnancy. She also gives up working on her Mary Shelley novel, but she doesn't stop thinking about Mary Shelley. The earlier writer's masterpiece and her biography provide a framework that helps the narrator understand both her pregnancy loss and--later in the story--the birth of a daughter. The narrator thinks about Shelley's experience of loss while trying to make sense of her own. She contrasts her own creation with Victor Frankenstein's while also comparing herself to Capt. Robert Walton, the Arctic explorer Frankenstein meets while pursuing his creature. This book would be valuable if only for Hall's phantasmagorical depiction of childbirth and her honesty about how lonely mothering can be. But Hall also situates her story in a world in which gene-editing technology and climate change and global pandemics are real. Like Shelley herself, Hall provides readers a text composed of diverse parts, a text that readers can endlessly take apart and stitch back together to create new ideas. Body horror and philosophy commingle in this strange, enthralling novel. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.