From Publishers Weekly
Set in an all-too-plausible future world with a falling birth rate, closed borders and lengthy adoption waiting lists, Reed's provocative SF novel explores the lengths desperate people will go to become parents. Jake Zorn and Maury Bayless, a childless couple in their 40s, approach Tom Starbird, a go-to man for high-end illicit "adoptions," but Jake, a newsman, isn't satisfied to just do business. If Starbird doesn't get them a baby, Jake threatens to not only ruin Starbird but also broadcast a shattering exposé about Starbird's mother, an unstable poet. Starbird, forced to agree, marks the baby of a pregnant artist, Sasha Egan, who lives in a home for unwed mothers. But Sasha flees the home and lays low, forcing Starbird to revise his plans. The inevitable clash among Sasha, Starbird and Jake forces each to rethink his or her motives. Reed (
Thinner Than Thou) succeeds in making her nastier characters appear more misguided than evil, but the long sections from the protagonists' different points-of-view, all written in the same style, tend to blur together.
(June) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
In a world distressingly like our own, in which babies are precious, and fertility can never be taken for granted, Sasha Egan and Tom Starbird are set up for a collision. Art student Sasha, "accidentally" pregnant, lives in a single-mothers' home until the baby arrives and is adopted. Tom is an adoption agent of last resort for the extremely desperate and wealthy. He "takes" neglected and unwanted babies to place with his clients, despite the infants' microchip implants. His latest client is a journalist who threatens to expose him on national TV unless he finds a baby. Meanwhile, feeling attacked on all fronts, including by her family and the baby's father, Sasha flees the home. Seeming the perfect candidate for a Starbird "rescue" operation, she turns out to have career-destroying potential for more than one person and complacency-shattering capacity for several others. Reed writes a fast-paced thriller with a consummate sense of style, even when gruesomely describing pregnancy and limning the mental state of a woman who wants to be pregnant and can't be.
Regina SchroederCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
