Raising a family is the ultimate luxury as the human race teeters on the brink of extinction in this visionary short story by Emma Donoghue, the bestselling author of Room.
Miriam was raised in a society without children. To offset the devastation of climate change, state-of-the-art birth control has made day-cares and playgrounds things of the past. As tempting as the government inducements are to remain child-free, Miriam's curiosity about the people who "drop out" of society to become parents grows. When she finds a like-minded partner, she must choose between the rewarding comforts she knows and the unknowable mysteries of being a mother.
Emma Donoghue's Halfway to Free is part of Out of Line, an incisive collection of funny, enraging, and hopeful stories of women's empowerment and escape. Each piece can be read or listened to in a single thought-provoking sitting.
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A few of us from Global Care were lunching out to celebrate our Spring Dividend.
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(Amazon Original Stories, 1 September 2020, 39 pages, ebook, borrowed from @AmazonKindle, #PrimeReading)
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I've read and enjoyed novels by the author so I was looking forward to this story. I really enjoyed Halfway to Free. It's quite sinister and cynical and has dark overtones. I loved the society the author creates in this story, where having babies is seen as abnormal and made almost impossible by the restrictions and barriers of society. Only the super-rich or freakish outsiders have babies. I felt great empathy for Miriam, whose curious about motherhood and gets a sinister telling off from her personal AI device when starts goggling pregnancy and childbirth. So much is packed into this stories pages and I felt like I was reading something much longer. I'd love to read a novel based on this.
