AUGUST 2023 - AudioFile
Stacey Glemboski's forthright yet intimate performance gives this quiet novel the immediacy of a memoir. The narrator, a novelist, wrestles with her feelings about pregnancy, birth, motherhood, and womanhood as she attempts to write a novel about Mary Shelley. Frustrated with her progress on it, she decides instead to write about an old friend's surreal experience of pregnancy. Glemboski's measured narration is wistful and soft, though she becomes animated and agitated during particularly emotional scenes, highlighting the protagonist's inner turmoil. This genre-blending book is full of challenging questions about bodily autonomy, art, choice, and the ways that history shapes lives. Glemboski is the perfect guide through a moving, eerie, contemplative listen. L.S. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
04/03/2023
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)
From the Publisher
In Hall’s hands, “Frankenstein” evolves yet again, this time becoming a parable for a contemporary American dystopia of climate change, abortion restrictions, family separation, white supremacy, and, finally, covid…Her ultimate insight is resonant.” — The New Yorker
"Visceral...[Hall] writes the body with poetic clarity and beauty." — The Guardian
"[A] visceral, chimerical genre bender." — Vanity Fair
"Devastating and sharp." — Los Angeles Times
"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." — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Hall's prose is taut, each word impactful, each short chapter a meditation on what could be...These short chapters build a complex web of interconnectivity, showing the ways that our actions are shaped by the threats of pandemic and climate change as well as the politics, bounds and potential of scientific inquiry." — BookPage
“What a brilliant novel! I was moved, troubled, enchanted; hardly able to breathe as I read. Hall’s dazzling and original tale has the force of myth, embodying the monstrous challenges of reproducing in our strange new world.” — Andrea Barrett, author of Ship Fever and Natural History
"I read this novel in a single rapturous sitting, torn between the desire to hurtle through its hypnotic prose and the desire to reread every perfect sentence. Reproduction exquisitely captures the lunacy of inhabiting an animal body with a human mind, and somehow manages also to be gross, funny, heartrending, and formally acrobatic. Louisa Hall is a singular talent and I am a devotee." — Melissa Febos, author of Body Work and Girlhood
"A brave and dynamic novel about the creation of life and art—narratively free, compulsively readable, and true-to-life." — Tao Lin, author of Leave Society and Taipei
"Graceful, precise, and perceptive, this is a memorable take on the danger and strangeness of pregnancy." — Publishers Weekly
“Reproduction will terrify and surprise. Hall’s almost surreal meditation on pregnancy, childhood, parenthood and a planet on the brink of collapse has enough real-world horrors that you won’t miss the slightly speculative televised ones.” — Los Angeles Times
AUGUST 2023 - AudioFile
Stacey Glemboski's forthright yet intimate performance gives this quiet novel the immediacy of a memoir. The narrator, a novelist, wrestles with her feelings about pregnancy, birth, motherhood, and womanhood as she attempts to write a novel about Mary Shelley. Frustrated with her progress on it, she decides instead to write about an old friend's surreal experience of pregnancy. Glemboski's measured narration is wistful and soft, though she becomes animated and agitated during particularly emotional scenes, highlighting the protagonist's inner turmoil. This genre-blending book is full of challenging questions about bodily autonomy, art, choice, and the ways that history shapes lives. Glemboski is the perfect guide through a moving, eerie, contemplative listen. L.S. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2023-04-11
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.
