Childless
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88,000 word adult novelFlap Copy: Dr. Harvey Sumner has a dirty little secret. Although he's a world renowned child psychologist with honors galore and the scion of a long line of child healers, he's childless and hasn't worked professionally with a single child for over thirty years.The tension between his fame and the reality of his life finally reaches a breaking point when he's kidnapped by the U.S. government and held in a bunker twelve floors below the National Institutes of Health. Here he learns of a covert government project to declare childhood as a medical disorder and eliminate it from the human genome in America.Will Harvey manage to escape from his underground prison and save the country's children and childhood itself? Or will America become a childless nation?
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Given how much of the western world has grown increasingly concerned about aging populations, the premise of Childless felt very relevant. The government depicted in the novel hatches a radical plan to kill two birds with one stone. One, get rid of the pesky immatureness of pre-adulthood. Two, push a steady stream of ready workers into a waning force.
Because of that correlation with real problems and the label on Discovery as a dystopian, it took me entirely too long to realize that this novel was meant to be satire. The difference in how much I enjoyed reading Childless between before and after that realization is huge. Through that lense, more of the story makes sense, and the extreme emotional swings or reactions have more of a place. Characters didn't seem quite as ‘spoof-like' anymore when you realize that was how they were supposed to be.
Even with that change in perspective, the novel can be a struggle to read at points largely because of its dialogue. What the characters say to each other isn't the real issue though, just the formatting. Much of the time, standard quotation marks aren't used (the opening mark looks like a circle almost). Alone, such a thing wouldn't be as distracting, but it kept swinging back and forth throughout the novel. Paragraph breaks for dialogue and the tags that help a reader understand which character is speaking and what they are doing while talking doesn't follow norms either. I often had to go back and reread.
The author employs a motley cast of characters in Childless, reminding me a few times of a circus. I enjoyed most of them, especially after looking at the work in the right light. However, I struggled with all but one of the female characters and how these characters became portrayed. If a female were present in the scene, the reader could expect one of or a combination of three things: crying, yelling, or throwing themselves at the protagonist. Whether intentional or not, this disappointed me.
I do think there would still be quite a bit of enjoyment to be had if a reader were to go in with the right expectations. Just think more A Modest Proposal than Children of Men.
