The Continuity Girl

By Leah McLaren.

(Disclaimer: this was sent to me by an agent.)

I had major problems with this book. I started out hating it, then started liking it, but hated it again by the end. This will make it probably the longest review ever on here. I have certain personal prejudices that this book triggered, and I will freely admit that this bias probably contributed to my feelings about it. Let's just get those out of the way right now before I start:

1. I don't want children of my very own. I don't hate children, I don't particularly care if anyone else wants to have them or not (this is more based on my own personal situation than a dislike of kids or parents in general), but I definitely do not relate to craving a child more than anything else in the world and wanting to do ANYTHING in order to get one. Maybe with regards to reading this book, that is a problem.
2. I generally dislike "OMG MY EGGS ARE ROTTING!!!!1111!!!"-type books, mainly because it seems like the heroines often engage in horrible behavior in order to get pregnant.
3. I find the idea of "sperm banditry," or claiming to be on the pill and getting knocked up by a one-night stand and then not telling him about the baby, to be reprehensible behavior. (Not to mention, what happens when your child gets ill and you have to look up your one-night fling in Ibiza and see if he's willing to do a bone marrow transplant? Or if you're in America, lose your job and  need to go on welfare, and have to fess up a babydaddy's name?)

And that's pretty much the entire plot of this book. Meredith Moore is a continuity girl (i.e. "script supervisor") on movie scripts who on her 35th birthday, has the OMG MY EGGS ARE ROTTING!!!111!!!! moment, goes to the gynecologist to get that confirmed, and then flies off to London to visit her mum, work on a movie, and get knocked up by some random sperm donor so she can get a baby.

I will also admit that the first 18 pages or so of this book made me seriously tempted to throw it against the wall and not finish reading it.

• Certain phrases (such as the repeated use of "yummies" for "yummy mummy", which was nauseating. Yes, I know the Brits do it, but it annoys me) got to me, particularly this sentence: "Meredith's blood redirected its flow toward the middle of her face, into the area beauticians call the "T-zone." Who the heck blushes on their forehead, nose, and chin, but NOT their cheeks? And what female reader is not going to know this information?
• And I about had a seizure when I read that Meredith attends prenatal yoga classes, despite not being pregnant. Why? "Her project was to study the Yummies in the hope that she might one day learn the secret of their effortless perfection. That is: how to get knocked up." You read that right: she thinks she can learn how to get pregnant by watching pregnant people do yoga. My head just exploded from the lack of logic of this. Gee, how's about HAVING SOME GODDAMNED SEX TO FIGURE THAT ONE OUT?!
• There was also a remark about how "Too much power (she had to admit it) made her feel less...feminine." That made me extremely mad.

So, what made me NOT throw this book against the wall and quit reading it? Well, thank gawd for the entrance of Meredith's nutty mother, who was a hoot to read about. From her second line in a letter ("I may be a wretched old cunt, but I'm still your mother"), to her fondness for wearing live creatures as jewelry, to her lines like "What were you doing in the freezer? You know I only use it to store the chandelier," I was amused as hell by her whenever she was on screen. Yay for Irma!

And despite the premise of "I'm going to find some guy to get me pregnant," the entire thing was treated in a fairly reasonable manner. Meredith figures out that picking out some random bloke isn't the best idea (one fellow turns out to take sexually abusive photographs for art purposes, another is an alcoholic (gay) falconer), and eventually comes to a mental place where she calms down about the whole thing. Her friend Mish, also on the baby quest but sensible enough to attempt impregnation by a gay pal (who GIVES CONSENT), ends up resolving her quest in a different manner, which I thought was pretty dang reasonable under the circumstances.

Meredith also has a daddy mystery of her own, as her own conception seemed to be at least somewhat (it's not exactly confirmed if it was deliberate or accidental) a case of sperm banditry. Her mother claims her father was a Hollywood fellow who drowned in a pool right after the conception, but Meredith doesn't buy that one worth a damn. And when she starts associating with a Hollywood producer who knows her mother, and seems to know an awful lot about her, she starts wondering....

I did wonder about the baby-wanting girls's reasons for wanting a child at times (Meredith says she "wants a little friend," I don't know if that's a good reason or not), but in the end, all of them come to a resolution and a realization. Which is good.

So, I was happy. Until the end, where I started to hate the book again. And I'm sorry, but I will have to spoil it from this point on (and it's NOT going below a cut) after this point, because I just can't cover it in a brief manner down there.

Here's what I hated:

1. Wouldn't it have been nice to give Meredith and Joe an actual courtship in this book? As things stand now, they vaguely sniff around each other (mostly long-distance) like wary dogs, then suddenly fall into bed and then it's "yay, love!" I wanted to see them get to know each other, or discuss things other than reproduction, if they are going to be a couple and in love rather than sperm donor and sperm bandit.
2. I loathe "miracle pregnancy" storylines. If you want to play with the idea of having an infertile character, there are ways to do that without going there. And to be honest, by this point I actually thought it might be interesting for the characters to really DEAL with the consequences of that, rather than go, "Twue Wuv makes babies!" If Meredith really loved the guy and he stayed infertile, would she just ditch him for someone who's fertile, or would she be willing to adopt, or have "her own" but with consenting donor sperm (which frankly is what she should have done in the first place) and having Joe raise it? Was there a way to work around this? And incidentally, Joe expects Meredith to dump him for his infertility, and yet his first wife was perfectly fine with adoption. Why would he immediately think she'd dump him? That hasn't been his experience before.
3. After writing an entire novel that reasonably shows why Sperm Banditry Isn't A Good Idea, how does the book end? With Meredith making a movie about sperm banditry, which is (as far as I can tell) still totally in support of the whole idea! Which completely undermines the point of the book! At this point, I wanted to bang my head against the wall.

*sigh*

In the end, I am giving it two and a half stars. The middle is good, but the start and finish annoyed the hell out of me. But keep in mind that a lot of this is my own personal prejudice, and normal baby-wanting women will probably love this and have no problems with it compared to me.

Comments

["The" Jess]

First of all, I know this was a very hard review for Jen to write, because she were really into it and hopeful when the mother was introduced. She wanted it to end with a powerful character, not on a schmaltzy note which would make a sane woman cringe.

While I accept Mama Wannabe lit is clearly a popular genre in romance and chick lit, it makes me think of that awful song by Heart, "All I Want to Do Is Make Love to You". I understand women wanting that last go at fertility, but that women want to read about something so desperately sad as denying a child its father is not funny. I know a woman who did it. It's not cute or sweet or funny. It's a human being stored in day care because Mommy wanted one last go at meiosis but couldn't sacrifice the career for the bundle of . . . something.

Sorry, but I'd avoid this book simply from the positive reviews on Amazon.com -- good, bad, or ugly review from Jen. What's sadder is that there is no lesson learned by the MC, something I assumed was part of the whole Chick Lit genre. The MC's reproductive system is the hero of the tale, not the MC. That's not right for Chick Lit. I want to read about women making bold, life-changing decisions and learning something about themselves -- man or not waiting at the finish line.

There's a market for Mama-Wannabe Lit, and had the agent READ the reviews here and why the reviewer liked certain books over others, I think s/he would have thought twice before tossing it at Speed-Reading Book Nerd Reviews.

I can only hope "Spoiling Egg Chick Lit" goes the way of "Rape-N-Revenge Sword-N-Sorcery Fantasy" soon, because it's just not pretty to watch women act like this. Her issues with her mother's "Oops" should drive the MC NOT to wants kids, not into the oncoming baby-makin' traffic coming other way.

Then again, I'm probably a heretic for hating Nicholas Sparks's Theresa in Message_in_a_Bottle and James Patterson's Katie from Suzanne's_Diary_for_Nicholas. Both female characters were sickeningly self-absorbed and learned nothing at all about the men they "loved" (both of whom were written well and with consciences).

Women who don't think past their own pores bug -- real or fictional. Period.

["The" Jess]

AIGH! *was, not were.