Title: The Baby Exchange
Author: Hannah Parry
Publisher: Hannah Parry
Pages: 284
My GoodReads Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
Mae Miller is not in a good space.
One of her two best clients, child actor Raphael Cooper, is undergoing dialysis
and is out of work. Her other best client, best friend Billy Mac, is being
poached by big talent agent Matthias Bloom, her mother is suffering from
Alzheimer’s Disease and she has no money for her care. When Mae discovers that
she is pregnant as a result of a one-night stand (it’s a cryptic pregnancy and
she is 37 weeks along), it seems like nothing could possibly get worse.
Hoping to earn some money and get her
child adopted, Mae contacts reality TV show, The Baby Exchange. At first, all
she cares about is the money. But over the next few days, the baby becomes
increasingly real to her. Will Mae exchange her baby for money?
As an idea, the premise was novel.
But the execution left me feeling dissatisfied.
The book was plagued with excessive description.
The book even began with unnecessary description before introducing the Main
Character and then giving us irrelevant details about her day so far.
Thereafter, it persisted with giving us long descriptions of nearly every
character and location, even going to the extent of describing TV sets and the
outfits of minor characters.
I did warm up to Mae in time, once I
realized that she was only 24, still young and not quite capable of handling
the problems she was faced with. But the extended and unnecessary introduction
to her life didn’t work for me. Also, her refusal to answer the calls of
Raphael’s mother Adele, despite knowing that Rafa was seriously ill, made her
appear inhuman.
On the other hand, characters like
Elsa, Mae’s mother, Israel, her caregiver, and the women at the reality show,
Aphrodite, Tamara, Scarlett etc. are flat, each a replica of the other.
I liked the bond between Mae and
Billy Mac. Billy had some potential but the plot didn’t give him much of an
opportunity to shine. As an antagonist, Bloom was weak. The presence of Padma
Rao, Indian-American, helped to check the diversity box.
The author makes the setting,
Hollywood, come alive, not so much physically but as a presence throughout the
story. She refers to Hollywood as a “tawdry city with its tinsel surface and
anorexic underbelly.”
I also appreciated her similes:
She hurled the words at him like they were dinner plates.
His voice was as empty as the desert at dawn before the wind rose.
The humour is subtle. We see one
example of it when the nurse tells Mae to breathe and the 3rd person
narrator tells us that Mae “wasn’t aware that she had stopped”.
As a light-hearted read about a young
girl who finds that being an adult is financially quite draining, it was fun.
But there were many issues that needed to be resolved.
As late as the 10 percent mark, we were
still getting background information about Mae’s childhood in a foster home,
her mother’s institutionalization, her work as a casting agent and her mother's
Alzheimer's Disease. The plot of the book doesn’t start till the 11 percent
mark when Mae learns that she is pregnant.
The names Mae and Billy Mac were just
too similar. There is a child actor called Raphael, affectionately called Rafa,
and a nurse called Raya. They don’t have any scenes together but why in a world
of a billion names, must their names sound so alike?
Joe, Mae’s neighbour, brings her a
crumpled piece of paper that, he says, fell out of her handbag. The narrator
tells us that the paper came from a fortune-teller machine at the beach. But
Mae never went to any such machine. Where did the paper come from then?
It was odd that the doctor didn’t
call her in for regular checkups, didn’t give her a list of things she could or
couldn’t do, didn’t schedule any blood or diagnostic tests or sonograms.
I was disappointed with the
resolution.
(I read this book on NetGalley. Thank you to the author, the
publisher and NetGalley.)
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