It is rare for me to say that a book I listened to would have worked better for me if I had read it. It is rare because the narrators nowadays do a phenomenal job bringing the characters to life.
Gemma was tough to get along with, from what I heard. The narrator was really good at the emotions, but the pacing was off. If I played it at normal speed, it was too slow for the emotions involved, and the next speed was a bit too fast.
I picked this book to see how the process of Gemma dealing with her body’s limitations was presented here. The time window is a little too short for reality, but I guess that is to be expected given the genre. That said, the process itself and the variety of experiences different women went through felt very real to me, unlike one or two other books that just label the entire situation under one large infertility umbrella.
Gemma is unable to have a child naturally; this fact was discovered quite early in some ways and late in others, given that she had a hidden issue all along. This news then spreads through her entire town, and it becomes her identity! Fast forward a few years, and she loves her job, crushing on her boss and staving off her mother’s well-meaning (but frankly ridiculous) blind dates. She decides that she needs to do something drastic to shake up her life and decides on having a baby by herself. She ropes her brother’s best friend into helping her, and a love story (obviously) follows. Josh is an excellent sensible foil to Gemma’s obliviousness. Her mother’s behaviour felt too off to me!
For anyone curious about the different stages of the investigation that might go into figuring out the fertility of a woman, this might actually help (As the entire book revolves around it). It is packaged in a rom-com for easier consumption, between some bad behaviour on Gemma’s part where she is literally blind to reality. However, this provides a satisfying learning curve for it all. I liked the book, the narrator and the overall love story (there are one or two graphic scenes, but not enough to bother me- but one should know what to expect), but as I mentioned earlier, the pacing threw me off.
I did not enjoy the mother’s behaviour or the obsession with quotes. If they were different ones each time, I might have been fine, but a select few are repeated once too often. Something we could have done without. I enjoyed the ending and would still recommend this to those people looking for a cozy story with some hard-hitting background.
I received an ARC thanks to NetGalley and the publishers but the review is entirely based on my own reading experience.
Superfluous Reading 