Wasp's Nest

Wow what a force of chaos

This is a NETGALLEY ADVANCED READING COPY:

Natalie has been working at a call center that takes calls from people who have complaints about their employers and working conditions. Some of these calls are awful to hear and process and she truly loathes her job but she needs money to live on. Her sister Phoebe is a nurse and works in a donation center for plasma and tells Natalie they pay everyone who donates. In debt with outrageous student loans, she starts to donate her plasma every few days. One of the nurses who works there shows Natalie a flyer that they have about recruiting women who may fit their requirements and to apply online. When Natalie takes a series of tests online, she gets a call the next day to say she has an interview. She arrives at the interview, having to sign an NDA before they even explain to her what the job entails and what the salary is: Natalie was being recruited to be a surrogate for working mothers who were professionals in C suite positions due to the fact THE COMPANY which is the name of the company, a huge capitalist corporation and enterprise that had their name everywhere and owned nearly everything. They claim they had done research and it showed that the all female company they had started for CSuite execs was not efficiently getting their quota done and work environment wasn’t going well when women left for maternity leave and they returned with less creative thinking and suffered from “brain fog” and while out on maternity leave they weren’t connected to their colleagues and the colleagues felt when they returned there was too much missed and they wasted time on getting the new mothers up to speed. To put an end to all this, The Company execs had decided to use surrogacy instead of these women getting pregnant themselves and then the work place environment wasn’t negatively impacted and the women wouldn’t need the maternity leave or sick days like they would if they’d given birth themselves. Natalie is to devote the next decade to The Company and be their only surrogate. They will allow her body 26 weeks in between pregnancies, a fallow time for her body and she was to agree having 7 pregnancies, if completed by the end she would get a $700k bonus plus $100k each birth and a bonus of 10k if it was a natural birth. The Company would provide her living arrangements, her food cooked by organic chefs and all her other expenses such as maternity clothes etc would also be paid. She couldn’t tell anyone in her life that was a surrogate and would use the cover excuses given to her by The Company To tell family and others. She signs the agreement and gets started right away. Her mother had 11 daughters and Natalie seems to have her mother’s good fertility rate and a hospitable womb. She loves not working she loathed it and had often dreamt of how to get by without having to do so and she’d felt so lucky she had somehow lucked into this sweet gig. But something happens, and Natalie is not getting the care that she had been previously and what is being asked of her she cannot seem to do. She doesn’t fulfill the demands they’ve set for her and she finds herself in the hands of a disgruntled employee from the Company who had gone to the news, outed Natalie and her whole world blew up and now she is being held by this women who has a serious grievance against the Company. But, nothing goes as planned or how Natalie assumed it would and she finds that for the first time, at 31 she has to grow up and decide how she wants to live the rest of her life and how to do so while being happy. Her journey through all her pregnancies, the many couples and parents that were the recipients of the babies she has birthed and all the different connections with them was surreal. The moral dilemma around this idea and the experiment this conglomerate was doing to keep their bottom line was one that will be accepted or not and the lines drawn in the public will be something Natalie also needs to cope with and figure out what she really feels about her part in it all.
Incredibly creative story, the main character, Natalie is so complex dynamic but so real and her personality is one that everyone gravitates towards. She’s brilliant and wickedly funny with a twisted sense of humor and sardonic way about it. As intelligent as she is, she struggles internally with her own purpose in life and is quick to feel that doing nothing is better than trying something and essentially gets stuck in her contract with the Conpany but also in growing up and adulting. For a decade this company has taken care of all her expenses and housework and meals. She doesn’t shop unless she wants to and has no idea how much things cost and what she’d need financially to retire or mainly just to live comfortably until she retired. She’s been in denial about her finances and future both with a career as well as in her relationships and when the bottom falls out from under her and the safety net is ripped away, she has a lot of growth ahead of her and as a reader you can’t help but root her on because she’s just so endearing and genuinely relatable it’s impossible not to fall in love with her, the stubbornness and immaturity and all. Natalie will surprise you and herself at every turn.
Thank you to#Netgalley for this ARC and to #SarahAnderson for this amazing book #Fallow and to the publishing company #Macmillian