Dark Lullaby
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
For fans of Black Mirror and The Handmaid’s Tale, a mother desperately tries to keep her family together in a society where parenting standards are strictly monitored.
"With fabulous world-building and a plot so tight you could bounce a quarter off of it, Dark Lullaby is a Handmaid's Tale for the modern world, about the ways our human need for love can serve as both society's salvation, and its undoing."
Sarah Langan, author of Good Neighbors
The world is suffering an infertility crisis, the last natural birth was over twenty years ago and now the only way to conceive is through a painful fertility treatment. Any children born are strictly monitored, and if you are deemed an unfit parent then your child is extracted. After witnessing so many struggling to conceive – and then keep – their babies, Kit thought she didn’t want children. But then she meets Thomas and they have a baby girl, Mimi. Soon the small mistakes build up and suddenly Kit is faced with the possibility of losing her daughter, and she is forced to ask herself how far she will go to keep her family together.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Middle grade author Ho-Yen (Fly Me Home) falters in her switch to adult fiction, an emotional dystopian story grounded in cultural anxiety around motherhood, but seated in an underexplored and often contradictory future world. Infertility has become nearly universal and government surveillance ubiquitous. Wealthy women can afford XC babies, created in laboratories and brought to term in artificial wombs, while others are encouraged to become pregnant via a painful, sometimes fatal, induction process—and shunned if they refuse. Once those babies are born, any minor parenting mistake can yield an Insufficient Parenting Standard citation, and if enough accumulate, the child is taken to be raised in a mysterious government camp. When Kit's daughter, Mimi, is seized, Kit goes on a quest to find her and uncover the truth of the system. Ho-Yen's characters are cowed by what seems a very haphazard process, have no understanding of their totalitarian government, and are apparently unperturbed that no one has ever seen the child compounds or reported being raised in one; this might be forgiven in a more allegorical treatment, but in the personal narrative Ho-Yen attempts, the plot holes gape. The abrupt ending, meanwhile, relies on a last-hour "gotcha" that feels cheap. The cultural critique is strong, but the execution is not.
