Dark Lullaby

January 18, 2021
Middle grade author Ho-Yen (Fly Me Home) falters in her switch to adult fiction, an emotional dystopian story grounded in cultural anxiety around motherhood, but seated in an underexplored and often contradictory future world. Infertility has become nearly universal and government surveillance ubiquitous. Wealthy women can afford XC babies, created in laboratories and brought to term in artificial wombs, while others are encouraged to become pregnant via a painful, sometimes fatal, induction process—and shunned if they refuse. Once those babies are born, any minor parenting mistake can yield an Insufficient Parenting Standard citation, and if enough accumulate, the child is taken to be raised in a mysterious government camp. When Kit’s daughter, Mimi, is seized, Kit goes on a quest to find her and uncover the truth of the system. Ho-Yen’s characters are cowed by what seems a very haphazard process, have no understanding of their totalitarian government, and are apparently unperturbed that no one has ever seen the child compounds or reported being raised in one; this might be forgiven in a more allegorical treatment, but in the personal narrative Ho-Yen attempts, the plot holes gape. The abrupt ending, meanwhile, relies on a last-hour “gotcha” that feels cheap. The cultural critique is strong, but the execution is not.