<I>First, a thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for allowing me to read a copy of this eARC.</I>

I honestly don’t know what to say about this book. It’s not that I don’t HAVE anything to say, or that I didn’t feel anything, but more that I feel like I cannot put to words the experience of reading this book.

It feels so deeply intimate and personal, I felt as if I were reading a diary, stealing glances in the dark.

On the other hand, I don’t think this book is meant to be secretive; I think one of the points of this book is the silent suffering of those who don’t have “typical” or “happy” experiences with pregnancy… which is, by all accounts in society, supposed to be the magical, wonderful, beautiful occasion.

In some ways as well I felt almost unprepared or not ready to read this book, having not experienced pregnancy myself. I’m not saying that was the point or intent of the book, just my own personal musings as I try to unravel my feelings now that I’ve finished this book.

I suppose you’ll just have to read it for yourself and see how you feel, in the end.

I read about the first third before I realized this just isn't the book for me. Books where motherhood — the concept of it, not just what comes with being a parent — are something that I'm trying to open up to, but this isn't going to be the book that gets me in.

I had to take a pause halfway through this novel to read Frankenstein - and I'm glad I did! I loved reading them in tandem, so interesting. I'm now a Mary Shelley fan, and a Louisa Hall fan. Thanks!

Louisa Hall is the author of fine novels - Speak (AI) and Trinity (Robert Oppenheimer) . and now Reproduction continues her fictional exploration of complex topics. With the focus on the individual the issue gains both clarity and nuance. All three books are highly recommended.

4.5 stars

In "Reproduction," Louisa Hall throws a lot at the reader. Pregnancy, miscarriage, childbirth, motherhood, abortion, embryo screening, eugenics, and climate change – it’s all there, all within a slim 225 pages.

From what I’ve gathered, the book is more autofiction than fiction. I believe Hall draws from her own experiences, including her own miscarriage, the narrator being an unnamed novelist who is struggling to write a book about Mary Shelley and "Frankenstein" while trying to have a baby.

I was surprised to learn that Shelley herself had a difficult road as a mother. She lost multiple children; their deaths, of course, heart-wrenching for her. And its through this lens – the lens of Mary Shelley, Hall’s personal story, and a biochemist character named Anna – that Hall examines the joy and danger women face when creating life.

Graphic miscarriage occurs on the page, as well as traumatic childbirth. There’s a focus on abortion, too. So steer clear if you don’t like harsh realism and politics in your fiction.

I found the story fascinating, though. The novel is so well written and so interesting. It really made me think.

I only wish it had a bit more emotion to it. Hall writes in a meandering style that feels detached, and she doesn’t even name any of the characters aside from Anna. It’s as if she’s maintaining a safe distance from the story, perhaps as an emotional protective measure since some of the events appear to be true to her life.

I must now read all the Louisa Hall books. "Speak" will be next.


My sincerest appreciation to Louisa Hall, Ecco, and NetGalley for the digital review copy. All opinions included herein are my own.

An enormous THANK YOU to NetGalley for providing me with an e-ARC of ‘Reproduction’ by Louisa Hall. Enthralling, full of empathy and layered conversation this book exceeded all of my expectations and has become a new favorite.

Reading, for the majority, like lyrical non-fiction we follow an author who is attempting to write a novel exploring Mary Shelley and her ‘Frankenstein’, as she struggles through fertility, and pregnancy.

Beautifully written and captivating I felt this one deep in my bones, in my guts, in my soul. It’s important, very important, to stress that there are trigger warnings for infertility, traumatic birth and miscarriage. This is not an easy book. But this is a careful book, an honest and connecting book. Louisa Hall puts into words the great isolation of pregnancy, loss and motherhood. She explores the ways we judge ourselves and other women, and unpacks the cold ways in which we are dealt with as we carry life and once we are no longer such a bearer. The main character reflects on Mary Shelley’s life, and speculates the longing and sense of loss that contributed to writing ‘Frankenstein’ and she compares herself, and her friend Anna, to her.

There is a small style and tone shift in the third section that I really enjoyed. It’s full of questions that will make you look inward, and yet the answers are not easy… the author not pushing you towards one. Instead, reminding us of the great love and bravery of existing in this world, loving a child— even if it is but an idea.

This covers the pandemic, and political realities that we all, in the US, faced from 2018 on. It is extremely real in this way, but has a dreamlike quality from start to finish. I’m absolutely in awe. If you are interested, be safe, but I will be forever changed by this novel and my experience in introspection while reading.

Out June 13, 2023!

I find Louisa Hall's books incredibly compelling and unsettling. I speed through them and at the end wonder, what did I just read? Their ideas stick in my head and create new thoughts, new ideas. This book is the same.

The structure blurs novel and memoir. It's set in the present day, with the backdrop of Covid and school shootings and political debate and laws about abortion. Sometimes too much present-day detail takes away from a book. Here, it worked for me because it drew attention to the vast difference between cultural debate and the lived experiences of women.

I think this book also gets right the insularity of pregnancy, the sort of tunnel vision that forms around reproductive health.

I don't know that I enjoyed this, but goodness I'm glad I read it. Glad it's in the world.

Thanks to Netgalley for the advance copy.

Pro-choice activists galvanized by recent court and legislative actions targeting abortion (and ultimately, presumably, birth control) could do worse in making their case than citing Louisa Hall's "Reproduction," which depicts in graphically horrifying detail the myriad risks facing expectant mothers. Molar pregnancies, in which a tumor develops as a result of a nonviable pregnancy; triploid babies, in which a developing fetus has 69 total chromosomes instead of the usual 46; deliveries that go on for hours and hours; miscarriages with oceans of bleeding, the scenarios are set forth to such horrifying effect in Hall’s novel that they made me wonder why any woman would ever want to become pregnant, particularly now amid a hidebound conservative sentiment which demands that women see their pregnancies through no matter if they came about through rape or incest or if they might make for life-threatening risks. (Particularly egregious in this regard for me is the insistence of some legislators that young pregnant girls, some not even old enough to fully understand what’s happening to them, take their fetuses to term.)
Not, of course, that most pregnancies don’t go perfectly smoothly with the mothers positively thrilled with their babies and in absolute awe of the wonder of creation, even as they might also be fully aware of the multitude of things that could have gone wrong and made for considerably less felicitous outcomes for mother or child. Like Mary Shelley's classic Frankenstein story in that regard, pregnancies can be the occasion for both awe and apprehension, and in fact Shelley’s story features prominently in Hall’s novel, in which her narrator, who’s also a writer, thinks to write about Shelley, who herself suffered pregnancy misfortunes as she penned her now-iconic creature story. Indeed, the circumstances of the composition of Shelley’s story are what most drew me to Hall's novel, with my being a writer myself, but in the end, as I’ve indicated, Hall’s novel is less about Shelley’s story than a chronicle of the misfortunes suffered by Hall’s narrator in her striving to become pregnant.
More than just a chronicling of her particular circumstances, though, Hall’s novel is also a full-on treatment of reproduction, both in artistic composition or in human development, including an examination of the ethics of harvesting eggs and embryo selection. The latter, indeed, makes for the closest the novel comes to a truly conventional story arc when an acquaintance of the narrator who has become pregnant through such procedures is fearful of what might be going on inside her and asks the narrator to accompany her on a literal middle-of-the-night sonogram check of her situation. Which in another novel or thriller movie might have made for a classically climactic moment, with a crescendo of music as the two get closer and closer to learning the truth, but here is presented straightforwardly enough, with no great dramatic fanfare, that a reader expecting a more usual dramatic climax might be in for some disappointment.
Nevertheless, for all that it might not be the conventual thriller or comforting fare that some readers might have preferred, Hall’s novel is to my mind a much-needed dose of reality in these fantasy-ridden times of ours in which millions of Americans choose to believe that a massive fraud of almost unimaginable proportions was perpetrated in the last presidential election or that the Jan 6 assault on the Capitol wasn’t what we all saw with our own eyes or, on the health front, that a life-saving vaccine wasn't the boon that it was but some kind of nefarious mind-control plot, or, perhaps most egregiously of all, that in instances of incest or rape, some sort of natural mechanism in a woman's body recognizes that something bad has occurred and kicks in to prevent a pregnancy.

A beautiful meditation on whether the age-old trope of book-as-baby is useful, is misguided, is true. The rawness of isolation in apocalypse comes through in such stark and striking snowscapes; the end of the world rages through wildfires, mudslides, uterine hemorrhage. I can't stop thinking about the protagonist's strange frenemy who dominates the final section, and I keep picturing her tiny, shaking dog. It's a novel fueled by sensation and sensibility more than plot, but I found myself devouring the pages for the descriptions.

It’s taken me eleven years of reading, and about a thousand more books, to be able to say once again: “This is the best book I’ve ever read.” For one thing Luisa Hall has written what is by far the best depiction of childbirth I've ever seen in print. Elsewhere in her book she has perfectly captured the hollow void of grief a woman feels after the miscarriage of a wanted child, and in other pages she reminds me of the sometime-strangeness of living inside a woman's body when it refuses to get pregnant when you want it to, or gets pregnant when you don't want it to. And yet this book holds so much more than these particulars about women and our bodies. I've had the privilege of spending time with a deeply feeling, deeply observant narrator, and she has gifted me with a wise and revelatory view of these times. I feel as if I can see this right-now world that we're living through together as human beings in a brand new way, because of this book. The plague. The weird climate events and what they might portend. The way new technologies keep upending our lives at an ever more frantic pace. The hysterical politics. When I read this book again in ten years I'll surely be saying to myself: "yes, that is exactly how it was." It's a marvelous gift of a book.

I will be posting this review in full on goodreads around publication date.

Sci Fi literary fiction, perhaps? I am here for it. Hall explores a world of motherhood and reproductivity in a fictional world that sounds all too familiar. A world where parts are crumbling from climate change and pollution, gun violence, pandemics and limiting women's rights to healthcare. We follow two women navigating fertility, pregnancy and motherhood when a world is falling apart at the same time technology feels limitless, leading us to ask ourselves how far would we go to protect our children from all that is dangerous.

I thoroughly enjoyed this one.

Thank you to NetGalley and Ecco for the ARC!

Now THIS was a fun story! I had to double check to make sure I was actually reading a novel and not a memoir. I can't share a full review as we're considering for Summer Reading Guide 2023 coverage, but I so enjoyed this unusual work. Reminiscent of the nonfiction work A Ghost in the Throat, which I adored. Thanks for providing a copy!

Louisa Hall's Reproduction calls to mind novels from Jenny Offill's oeuvre, Weather and Dept. of Speculation, and Meaghan O'Connell's memoir, And Now We Have Everything. Hall's semi-autobiographical novel about motherhood, written yesterday and interpolated with topical political commentary, struck me as familiar and stale. (I may be taking too many liberties by calling Reproduction semi-autobiographical. That's merely a hunch that arises anytime the first-person narrator is a writing professor.) The unnamed main character, her unnamed husband, and their unnamed baby seem to exist in a kind of vacuum. Readers know very little about who they are, what they say, or how they act. We know more about the political climate--and rapidly-warming climate--within which they live.

Hall's reflections on pregnancy are prescient. I was gripped by the narrator's pregnancies, pregnancy losses, and experiences with medical maternal care. Hall insists that women's reproductive years are formative and distinct whether one gets pregnant or doesn't, chooses to get pregnant or avoids doing so. This is a novel about women's reproductive lives, as opposed to pregnancies. The latter implies something self-contained and more readily processed. I appreciated this point of view, which was complemented and deepened by Hall's recurring turn to Mary Shelley's biography.

Near the novel's end, Hall's protagonist plays with her daughter during a thunderstorm and decides to write a novel about pregnancy and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Her novel would be "made of disparate parts, flesh and bone, blood lost in a hemorrhage, stitched-together old skin. A book that would stir with uneasy life. A little disjointed, perhaps, but a book I wouldn't leave." This metatextual nod, with its allusion to Frankenstein, is meant to lead us to the realization that this is that novel. I didn't feel I was reading that strange, creaturely text. The narrative was straightforward and highly expository. A typical passage reads: "I passed reception on my way out. They said I owed another ten dollars for the blood draw. I started to give them a credit card, but they told me they already had one on file. Great, I said, then headed down another long hallway." Bogged down by bland action, I missed the atmospheric pressure evoked by Hall's source material, Frankenstein. (The lovely dream sequences in Reproduction stand out as strange, notable exceptions to this disconnect.) In the absence of narrative affinity, revelations about "what Mary Shelley knew" felt rather hollow.