Reproduction

January 1, 2023

In this follow-up to Audrain's New York Times best-selling debut, The Push, a child loudly berated by his mother at a suburban barbeque later slips from his window and ends up in a coma, prompting Whispers in the neighborhood about what really happened. After debuting with the all-star A Proposal They Can't Refuse, Ca�a cooks up A Dish Best Served Hot, featuring a single dad who falls for his daughter's teacher but jeopardizes their relationship with actions (undertaken for familial duty) of which she disapproves (50,000-copy first printing). In mega-popular Carr's The Friendship Table, four women working together on a highly rated cooking show join forces when they discover that their youngest member has an abusive boyfriend (200,000-copy first printing). When her mother, badly injured in an accident, asks Cornelia Brown to bring her the Northern Lights, a puzzled but obliging Cornelia sorts through her mother's secret past to figure out what she means in Watch Us Shine; from New York Times best-selling de los Santos (75,000-copy first printing). In Trinity author Hall's Reproduction, a novelist abandons a book about Mary Shelley that touches on her challenging pregnancies when she confronts her own painful pregnancy and childbirth and instead turns to writing a modern Frankenstein (75,000-copy first printing). The young man who walks into the Cape Cod bookstore where unassuming Harlow Smith works isn't exactly A Little Ray of Sunshine--he's the child she secretly birthed and gave up for adoption 17 years previously; from the New York Times best-selling Higgins. With the death of her husband, popular food blogger Hollis Shaw decides to heal by engaging in something called The Five-Star Weekend, which entails inviting a best friend from each stage of her life to a special gathering--in this case, on mega-best-selling author Hilderbrand's beloved Nantucket (750,000-copy first printing). Moderately contented Heather is surprised to find herself gobsmacked when a former flame finds new love, and friends Daphne and Tori have their own troubles, but in Mallery's latest, will The Happiness Plan of each woman work? In Monaghan's Same Time Next Summer, following the LibraryReads pick Nora Goes Off Script, Sam is hunting for a wedding venue near her family's Long Island beach house when she encounters Wyatt, the love of her life until he broke her heart at age 17. Following the LJ-starred The Messy Lives of Book People, also a LibraryReads pick, Patrick's The Little Italian Hotel features relationship expert Ginny Splinter, who's sideswiped when husband Adrian asks for a divorce and recovers by taking four strangers to Italy on the vacation she had originally planned with Aidan in the (75,000-copy paperback and 10,000-copy hardcover first printing). In Pride and Piazza's You Were Always Mine, a Black woman named Cinnamon is grateful to be leading a secure, quiet life when she causes an uproar by keeping a white baby she finds abandoned in the park by teenage Daisy, whose grandparents threaten to take custody. In this latest from the beloved Shipman, daring Mary Jackson is Famous in a Small Town in Michigan for her 65-year-old record in the annual cherry pit-spitting contest until modest schoolteacher Becky, determined to shatter her shell, lands in town and breaks the record (100,000-copy paperback and 10,000-copy hardcover first printing). When her parents die in an accident when she is 23, Cosima Saverio inherits their fabulous Palazzo and haute couture Italian leather brand, but she's all work until...

April 3, 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.

Starred review from May 1, 2023
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.

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