The Baby Trail: A Novel FROM THE PUBLISHER
Makeup artist Emma Hamilton is thirty-three when she and her husband James
decide it's time to start a family. She has it all mapped out: Go off the pill
in December, have sex, get pregnant by January, have the baby in September. With
the help of a personal trainer, she figures she'll be back to her fighting
weight in time for Christmas. But when three months of candle-scented sex fails
to produce the desired result, Emma decides that maybe Mother Nature needs a
helping hand.
Soon her life is a roller coaster of post-coital handstands (you can't argue
with gravity), hormone-inducing (sanity-reducing!) drugs, and a veritable army
of probing specialists (torturers, more like). It's out with alcohol and
spontaneous sex, in with green tea and ovulation kits. Emma and James try
everything from fertility drugs to in vitro, but all their carefully laid plans
seem to go south -- along with Emma's rapidly plummeting self-esteem.
The members of her support team are unquestionably loyal, but distracted by
their own personal dramas. There's Babs, her younger sister, who prescribes Emma
half an Ecstasy pill to treat her depression. Her friend Jess is pregnant with
her second child and gives Emma an earful about the downside of motherhood. The
glamorous Lucy, Emma's closest pal, fears she might be stuck in her "single rut"
forever -- that is, until she meets Donal, a rough-around-the-edges rugby player
who passes out on their first date but quickly proves that he is worth a second
chance. And last, but certainly not least, is James, Emma's rugby coach husband,
who quite unhelpfully manages to give himself a groin injury just when she is
ovulating.
But just when Emma feels as if her obsession may have alienated all of her
loved ones, including James, events take a ninety-degree turn that will have
unforeseen consequences for everyone.
Sinead Moriarty brings a wicked sense of humor to a subject of feverish
concern for women worried by the loud ticking of their biological clocks in this
sizzlingly funny, yet deeply moving novel.
FROM THE CRITICS
Kirkus Reviews
Irish journalist Moriarty's first fiction depicts a young woman feverishly trying to get pregnant. After a year of marriage, make-up artist Emma and rugby coach James decide to have a baby. Emma starts to schedule their sex when she is ovulating. She alters their diet and tells James to stop masturbating because it uses up sperm. As months pass, Emma's level of desperation rises quickly, as if the author felt she had to condense her trauma to keep it within the novel's time frame. Moriarty writes witty, lively dialogue, and her heroine is self-aware and often very funny about her self-absorption, but women who have struggled with infertility over much longer periods may find Emma's impatience so early on a tad annoying. She briefly tries yoga, but it doesn't calm her down. After a year, she goes to a fertility clinic, where she learns that there's no physical reason she can't conceive. She begins to take a fertility drug. Regular acupuncture sessions help her relax, but apparently not enough. When a policeman stops her for driving recklessly after visiting a friend who has just had her second baby, Emma pours out her woe. Coincidentally-and heavy-handedly-the policeman and his wife had the same problem and have just adopted a child from Romania. For their anniversary, Emma drags Protestant James to Lourdes, although she is supposedly a lapsed Catholic. She tries in vitro fertilization once, but it doesn't take. After two obsessive years, Emma decides she's through and wants to adopt. Ever-patient James balks halfheartedly before agreeing, and the story abruptly ends. Can a sequel on the ups and downs of the adoption process be far behind? Despite clever jokes and banter, this is allpretty much a yawn. More a fact-filled report on conception and infertility than real novel.
Home
