An interesting book, slightly hard to get into, but worth persevering. I think it is harder because we get little idea of time scale, and it does take a while to work out who is talking. But in the end, it all makes sense.
Some unusual ideas, and well thought through, and it is definitely an idea which you feel by the end is different shades of grey.

A fascinating futuristic exploration of what would happen if birth was democratised via technology. Told in a very warm, relatable way through the eyes of a number of different characters so you get different insights into the impact of this technology on the world - including embracers and refuseniks - the novel touches on the important topic of how scientific progress is assessed and evaluated for risk, how it's commercialised and the impact this has on our health - both individually and as a society / species. The writing is incredibly readable and the gentle elements of mystery / thriller threaded through added pace and kept me turning the pages until the end, which was satisfying without being overdramatic. A worthwhile thought experiment, recommended. Thanks to Netgalley & the publishers for the opportunity to read.

A really fascinating concept / idea of a future where both parents can be equally involved in (external colour-themed) gestation... but life just isn't that neat and tidy, and humans and families are complex

I really enjoyed this book. In this we see the invention of the pouch which means that now anyone can have a baby. A gay couple can get pregnant and carry the pouch around them and then swap over when they want to. Infertile woman can now carry a baby regardless. But now everything that could go wrong is. Is the pouch safe? Was it a mistake? This book is a feminists view of all the different ways of a possible pregnancy. I loved reading this story. I couldn’t stop, I absolutely flew through this. Such an interesting book.

I have bought a copy in hardback. Intriguing and slightly Handmaid's Tale-ish as I started reading it.

I fully enjoyed this book and interesting take on the dystopian theme. I had the pleasure of hearing Helen Sedgwick talk at a local independent book shop, where she discussed the idea of the roles of men and women during pregnancy and how her novel discusses this idea of those 9 months being turned almost into a commodity to make profit from in a capitalist driven world. I would urge you to read this fantastic book definitely have a new perspective I've never seen handled within fiction.

Helen Sedgwick's vision of a future where babies grow in artificial wombs, cared for by both parents and the extended family, appeals in many ways. But how safe can technology really be? Sedgwick builds a vivid but paranoid world where technology can only do so much - humans, as always, must take responsibility for the rest.

‘Now anyone can have a baby.
With FullLife’s safe and affordable healthcare plan, why risk a natural birth?
Just choose the colour of your pouch and its accessories’

My first time reading Helen Sedgwick’s work and I was not disappointed! A powerful novel exploring parenthood, gender roles and the pursuit of science is impossible to put down.
“What’s the virtue of putting women through pain?”
The book focuses upon the use of ‘pouches’ over a natural birth, allowing both father and mother to be involved in the birthing process. In what seems a not so distant future, with FullLife at the helm of national healthcare, this evolved birthing method is given a dystopian twist, with secrecy and psychological trauma at the heart of the novel.
“Perhaps we should be celebrating the strength of women”
The family is given almost celebrity status as the birth pouch is used across the generations. Initially, the strength of women is celebrated through the fact that they have chosen FullLife over natural birth. Nevertheless, Sedgwick cleverly used the sci-fi backdrop to examine gender roles, and the effects of them subverted through the birthing pouches. It left me contemplating a lot over my views regarding birth, abortion and men’s involvement in childbirth.
If you’re looking for some new dystopia, this thought-provoking book is definitely worth a read!

The Growing Season is the story of a dystopian future where anyone can have a child -- male, female, fertile, infertile -- using a commercially available external pouch. I was intrigued by the idea of this, or more so the ethical conundrums it creates and how the author may present and/or tackle them. The plot focuses on many people who have had interactions with the pouch, whether that be being born as result of it, or being opposed to its introduction. Then things begin to go wrong and the science is called into question. Whilst I continued to find the concept interesting, I struggled a little bit with the story: I often felt distracted and not able to fully latch on (no pun intended) to what was happening to the characters, or to the characters themselves. I'm not sure whether that was because I'm quite science-focused and it was difficult firstly, to picture exactly how the pouch itself looks or feels. I cannot say that is because the author didn't do a good job of trying to explain that, just that I am visual learner and it was difficult to imagine such an unknown quantity. Secondly, my mind kept wondering back to the actual background science. That's not a distraction everyone will have though, admittedly. So in summary: great concept, I just didn't gel with this particular telling of it or the characters so much.

I loved the premise of this book and I have kept trying over a few months to get into it but I’m just not able to finish it. I’m not sure if it’s the writing style or the number of characters to follow, but unfortunately I just don’t think it’s for me. When I enjoy a book is usually finish within a couple of days, but this one has taken me over 3 months to get 38% of the way though.

Everything about Helen Sedgwick's The Growing Season is magnificent: the plot is engaging, the characters are believable, and the writing is superb.

In this new age, anyone can have a baby. Thanks to medical advances, ecotogenisis – pregnancy and birth outside the womb – is now possible using FullLife’s stylish birth pouch, which can be carried by both parents.

In The Growing Season, the political is personal, where the ethical dilemmas represented by this new world are examined through the moving everyday lives and relationships of its richly drawn characters.

There’s Holly, who was the first woman to use the pouch, and her granddaughter, about to give birth through a pouch. There’s Eva, whose mother campaigned tirelessly against the pouches, and her ex, Piotr, a journalist reporting on the latest famous pouch birth. We are also privy to the private "audio logs" of someone whose name we do not initially know, although her role becomes clearer as the novel progresses.

Science fiction is blended with literary fiction to great effect in The Growing Season; the place we see in the pages feels like a society we know, or at least one that is conceivable somewhere on the horizon, not an unbelievable, alternate universe.

It’s set in the London we know today, with people just like us, but with medical advances we haven’t yet imagined and thorny ethical questions we haven’t yet asked. It’s one with an entirely private health system, dominated by FullLife, one that is hiding something about the pouch that the characters are determined to find out.

In short, The Growing Season is easily one of the best books I’ve read in 2017.

The idea of a biotech baby pouch doesn't seem that far-fetched anymore, and the novel beautifully brings to life (no pun intended) the pro's and con's of such technology as well as the grey inbetween. Having multiple narrators lends weight to the various viewpoints, but it can be confusing keeping track of who's who and in what time period. The plot was a little thin and the story wrapped up a bit too neatly at the end, but it was a great read and definitely makes you think.

Imagine the potential gains that could be made in equality if women could truly share child-raising from the moment of conception. Such is the concept of Helen Sedgwick's clever science fiction, The Growing Season, where babies are grown in pouches, not wombs, and couples can carry and care for them equally.

However, all is not quite as well as this utopian, egalitarian picture seems. As the story follows the woman who created the pouch and other members of her extended family, a less perfect picture unfolds of loss alongside love. The characters desperately search for the answers to whether the pouch is morally and statistically any better or safer for children and women than natural birth and for their own family and sense of resolution.

Overall, The Growing Season is an excellently crafted story with a unique concept that retains a personal touch by telling the story through the perspectives of a single family. The only criticism I have is that making the switches in perspective and how the characters relate to one another much clearer would have made it an easier and more satisfying read from the start- I ended up drawing myself a family tree out! Great for fans of science fiction with a focus on women.

A wonderful work of speculative fiction, similar to The Power in the way it examines the implications of a world where the male and female power dynamic is critically changed. It confronts the reader with uncomfortable questions about how we see the world and our place in it, the concept of parenthood, and how society is built. As well as making us think about how we view men and women, it speaks the human relationship science, namely the question: just because you can do something, should you? This book is ominous, compelling and well-written. An excellent read.

I just found this incredibly slow, unfortunately. This is a shame as I was looking forward to reading "The Growing Season". I got 4 chapters in and just thought the book wasn't for me.

1.5 Stars!

I liked the concept. That babies are produced in a sack, instead of through sexual activity. It could have been a good book if it was written about better.

That's why I'm giving the book 1.5 stars...there was hope. It just wasn't carried through.

I absolutely loved this book, it was so different from what i expected it to be and not something i normally would of picked up to read.

Sylvia and Frieda create Firstlife, a company that invents a wearable synthetic pouch that can be worn by either parent until the baby is born. The baby is created entirely outside of a human body.

Holly goes to university with Frieda and volunteers to be the 1st person to have a baby via the pouch. She has a successful birth and goes on to have many more children via the method. Fast forward a few decades, the pouch is the preferred method for having children, the nhs collapsed years ago, and Holly's granddaughter Rosie and her husband Kaz are about to have their 1st baby, but something goes horribly wrong and Holly and 2 journalists go in the search for Frieda who disappeared years earlier to try and get some answers.

Kept me interested all the way until the end. Fantastic read!

Imagine a world where anyone can conceive a child.  Anyone.  In The Growing Season, Helen Sedgwick's follow-up novel to her acclaimed The Comet Seekers, we are transported to alternative reality, one that closely resembles our own except for one crucial detail.  At some point in around the 1970s, science was able to create an artificial womb known as 'the pouch'.  Flashing forward fifty years, natural birth is outdated, the pouch accepted and ubiquitous and the initial pioneer Holly Bhattacharya, first woman to be mother to a child born via the pouch, is now 76 years old and awaiting the birth of her first great-grandchild.  Across town, Eva shuts up shop on the campaign against the pouch which she has been waging all her life, the protest she inherited from her mother - she can see now that the pouch will never be stopped, that it is what people want.  But is the pouch really as perfect as it appears?

As Alderman did so successfully in The Power, so also has Sedgwick launched a fascinating feminist thought experiment.  With a background as a research physicist behind her, it is hardly surprising that Sedgwick brings some of this thinking to her work.  Her envisaging of a world where artificial gestation is possible feels remarkably close particularly now that surrogacy and IVF are now so mainstream.  With the pouch, gay and trans couples are now able to conceive children as easily as their heterosexual counterparts and women are easily able to put off motherhood into middle age.

The narration is swapped back and forth between various interested parties. As well as Eva and Holly, there is Holly's granddaughter, the excitable mother-to-be Rosie, then Karl who is one of Rosie's fathers-in-law and also Piotr, a journalist.  Most enigmatic however is Frieda, the enigmatic scientist who first developed the pouches and worked with Holly on the early human trials.  Not long after the pouch was proved successful, Frieda abruptly walked away from the project, having cut all ties with FullLife, the company who now possess the monopoly over the pouch patent.  Living beside a lighthouse and far away from the rest of the world, Frieda speaks her thoughts into a tape recorder and looks forward to the weekly visits of the Asda delivery driver.

The Growing Season is a restrained novel, almost reticent in how it imagines a world without pregnancy, allowing the plot to speak for itself.  In her youth, Frieda is said to have worked with Rosalind Franklin, the infamously uncelebrated pioneer of DNA whose work was purloined by Watson and Crick.  Holly fumed through her childhood and adolescence as her parents gave opportunities to her brother and then denied them to her, certain that the biological requirement for women to carry children is the root of female subordination.  With the pouch flipping this on its side, surely utopian equality can be achieved.  Right?  Right?

Much has been made of the line of literary descent between The Handmaid's Tale and The Power, with Margaret Atwood having acted as mentor to Naomi Alderman.  However, for all of that, The Growing Season has in many ways a more direct relationship with the issues explored in Atwood's seminal novel.  I found myself thinking more than I can ever remember doing in the past about society's attitudes towards pregnancy.  This year has seen a great deal of debate around reproductive health and seen a number of senior politicians come out with some highly inflammatory views on the topic.  It is incredible to me that people can look at women and see their ultimate purpose as no more than a vessel but this archaic view is still prevalent in society - if this role truly was removed, what would be the consequences?

Sedgwick sketches out a world where parenting is fairly distributed, how the fact that men have had a role in gestating their child makes them feel more involved from the beginning.  Women no longer need time off after the birth to recuperate meaning that if they wish they can return to work straight away.  Birth injuries are over, birth defects are eradicated - the pouch is safer, easier, more fair - it's just better.

Prospective mother Rosie is barely out of her teens - she tells journalist Piotr excitedly about the meaning of the designs on her pouch cover, her young husband Kaz plugs the audio adaptor into the pouch before bed so the fetus can hear his band play.  They explain how little they anticipate the baby's birth interfering with their life plans - the pouch feels like an accessory.  There is something uncomfortable here, as if the verses in the Bible about childbirth is Woman's punishment for the Fall really have seeped into our collective consciousness.  Every mother I know has a birth story - it is called 'labour' for a reason, it is not easy.  It feels wrong-footing to imagine a world where it is easy.  I was reminded of the doctor in The House of Hidden Mothers who realises to her horror that a couple have decided to hire a surrogate not due to fertility issues but to avoid the stress of childbirth, just as one might put a ready meal in a microwave rather than cooking from scratch.

I have always felt uncertain about the idea of pregnancy myself but the idea of this role being taken away gave me a sense of possessiveness..  Holly's husband Will carried the pouch for his children and delighted over being able to feel the fetus moving, an experience that has never been available to men in the real world.  Karl writes an impassioned letter of gratitude to Holly for going through the pouch trials, her work having been crucial in allowing members of the gay community such as himself to experience pregnancy.  Holly remembers decades later how her mother quietly told her that she had loved carrying her own children.  Rather than suffering under the curse of Eve, are women perhaps blessed in having the gift of a womb?

Like ripples on a pond, the consequences of the pouch spread further.  The religious right were won over when FullLife began presenting the pouch as an alternative to abortion, with women who had unwanted pregnancies having the option to transplant them into a pouch.  Of course, the pouch means that adoption rates have plummeted so low that these unwanted children have to grow up in care homes.  Frieda remembers the moment she realises that in commandeering pregnancy, abusive males gained even more control over their wives and children.  Someone else observes how the rise of female CEOs has left men feeling threatened and how now the once accepted conservative gender role of mother is gone, the battle lines between the sexes have become drawn out only more clearly.

Pregnancy has become more commercialised in recent years.  There is a whole industry around what one ought or ought not to eat while in the family way, hosts of apparently well-meaning advice which studies have shown only make pregnant women feel worse.  One can have a 3D scan, or a belly cast, or 3D print an effigy of your developing child, find out what its gender is, name it, all before you ever meet them.  In a world that has stripped away so many of our messy physical realities, it is truly surprising that nobody has yet found a work-around so that the unpleasant business of labour.  Rosie dismisses the idea of pregnancy, of actually feeling her baby beneath her ribs, as gross.  This reminded me of a class I taught once who loudly objected to a topic on the human body because they regarded their physical processes as disgusting.  Given all this, Sedgwick's FullLife corporation seemed worryingly plausible.

The contrast between the pouches which the wealthy Bhattacharya family could afford and the used ones which poorer families would be reduced to was a striking depiction of a real issue.  Eva watches a couple using 'the oldest pouch she had ever seen', trying to play music to their unborn child even though it does not have the audio adaptor.  Earlier in her life, she had travelled to Russia with Piotr and seen pouches left with the same nutrition bag for days at a time, abandoned fetuses left to starve.  Frieda had specified that the pouch had to feel natural, that people had to feel able to hug it, snuggle it close, that it should feel warm - she wanted people to feel the same attachment.  Still, it all recalls the Nestle powdered milk scandal, where people were told that bottle was better than breast for babies - a real life case of a corporation literally turning people against Mother Nature, with disastrous consequences.

A less astute writer than Sedgwick would have come down hard against FullLife and the pouch but instead, The Growing Season embraces the injustice of human biology.  When something goes tragically, heartbreakingly wrong, Karl is furious that a father is blamed, that it is implied that they used the pouch incorrectly, but his husband points out that in the pre-pouch days, women were commonly held responsible.  We all know that this still happens.  Activist Avigail, Eva's mother, claims that women's primary purpose is to create life, with her argument feeling uncomfortably similar to US politician Justin Humphrey's statement that women exist only as 'hosts' once they are 'irresponsible' enough to have sex.  The children who are born from the pouch - Daphne, Rosie, Kaz - are all cherished, loved, valued.  The chief of FullLife takes off her suit, dons a woolly jumper and becomes human.  We gain glimpses of a different world - a male receptionist absently stroking the bump of his pouch as he goes about his work, of family friends carrying the pouch for short periods so that they feel a part of the child's tribe.

The Growing Season leaves intriguing gaps for a reader - the idea of the care homes for unaborted children intrigued me and felt under-explored given the upsurge in the personhood movement.  I found Frieda's characterisation frustrating in places and I would have liked to have understood more about Avigail.  Still, what really struck me was how Sedgwick managed to explore one of the few truly universal human experiences from such an original and thought-provoking angle - the ramifications of how society would change if women's bodies were for themselves alone, how our own relationships with our parents would shift if there was more parity between them from the beginning.  What do we become if we transcend biological function?  As technology and science move ever forward, this feels like a question worthy of discussion.

Although it was a bit heavy-handed in places I generally found this a fascinating read. It presents a feminist vision of the near future that put me in mind of Naomi Alderman's "the Power" and Margaret Atwood. Very timely - I expect this to be popular.

With FullLife’s service, women can finally get rid of all the negative aspects of pregnancy. No more sickness, no more pain during child birth and no more abstaining from alcohol and cigarettes and all the fun. And the best: the men can play a part, too! Simply use the pouch and have your baby cuddled in the perfect environment for 9 months. It does not take too long to convince the people that this is real evolution, the next step that makes mankind throw away the ballast and dangers connected to a pregnancy and child birth. And not to forget: this is how non-traditional families can finally fulfil their dream of having a baby. That’s what science is for, to lift mankind to a higher level, isn’t it? But progress normally also demands a price to be paid, it never goes for free. Up to now, however, only few people know how high the price really is.

Helen Sedgwick’s novel which is somewhere between Brave New World and The Handmaid’s Tale, raises a lot of questions. First of all, how far do we want to go for comfort and the fulfilment of our wishes. It only sounds too attractive to overcome all the negative side effects of being pregnant. And of course, the line of argumentation that now men and women are really equal since women cannot be reduced to reproduction anymore is also tempting at first. Second, we see scientists who – for different kinds of reason – act against their conscience and subordinate everything to alleged progress. Ethics cannot be ignored, undeniably, but sometimes there seems to be the time and space when you can sedate these thoughts and mute them in a way. Yet, quite naturally, this does not make the questions go away.

The novel tells the story from a very personal point of view which allows the severe topic to come across in a very human way with characters who have feelings and who suffer. In this way, you get involved in what they go through, the loss, the hopes, the fears. It does not provide easy answers to huge ethical dilemmas, but it adds some perspectives and reveals that quite often, there is much more than just black and white and that it is the different shades of grey which make it difficult for us to decide on the core questions of life. Lively characters portray this dilemma in a convincing way thus the novel can take it on with the great names of the genre.

What an interesting book this is, both philosophically and emotionally. It tells the story of FullLife, a company that created pouches that replace wombs and can be carried by both men and women, secrets kept from the public and the people who are trying to investigate the issue. The concept of industrialising childbirth is not new, but what the author has done here is introduce a world that on the surface, would be quite desirable to many people. The pain of childbirth is removed and the process becomes one in which both parents can take an active role. One of the key arguments in the book is the inequality prevalent in society, due in part to the time away women must take when they become pregnant. I think that this is a fascinating area of philosophical debate and the book very cleverly leaves the issue open, drawing few conclusions. The narrative is really well paced and the characters are convincing, believable and very human. For me, this would be a great book to read in a book club, or in schools alongside other future explorations of childbirth and population control and I think that it has real relevance both now and in the future.
I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for a fair and honest review.