I received an Advance Readers Copy of this book thanks to the publisher. All opinions are my own. Pub date: March 3, 2026.
Ava is a book with a fascinating premise and a lot to say. While it falls short in all it is trying to do, I still found it to be a compelling read and a timely one.
Set in the near future of the United States of America, Larkin and Spender meet as university students, quickly fall in love, and marry. They are both smart and driven and begin their married life full of plans and dreams. An immediate pregnancy isn’t in their initial plans but when it happens soon after their wedding, they are excited and eager to welcome their daughter. But soon Larkin is given the devastating news that their baby will not live long past birth. This is Tennessee in the post Roe vs Wade world so Larkin and Spencer have no choice but to finish out the pregnancy and birth a baby who cannot live.
This changes everything for them and pushes Larkin to a place where she is too afraid to ever give birth again. Until years later and an experimental new procedure. What if women didn’t have to gestate their own pregnancies anymore? What if genes could be altered just enough so that future generations don’t need to go through the hardships of pregnancy and childbirth? What if women could lay eggs?
This is a novel with a scope that is long but not necessarily deep. We go back as far as 1988 to the birth of the scientist who develops this technology and we see why it is so important to him. We follow Larkin and Spencer for years, from their first meeting until they are grandparents. We see the outcome of Larkin’s second pregnancy and then the life of the child that this pregnancy results in. It’s a lot and it goes a long way in explaining why the characters are driven in the ways that they are. At the same time, I never felt deeply connected to any of the characters. Larkin seems like she might be the main character of the book but then we move away from her. There is some true heartbreak on the page here so it’s hard to explain why I never quite felt the emotional punch that I would have expected from a book like this.
I also found it interesting that this development of women being able to lay eggs was only viewed as a positive thing by the characters. Within the novel, this is done by altering an embryo’s genes so that the egg-laying occurs naturally. When that baby girl grows up, she has no choice but to deliver any children via egg. Much of Larkin’s devastation around her first pregnancy was around the fact that she had no choice but to deliver her child. So I found it strange that there didn’t seem to be any concern around the fact that she was taking this choice away from her own future child by altering their very genetics. Dillon creates a future USA that is increasingly attempting to control women’s fertility (and this doesn’t feel much like fiction) and so the idea of women being able to lay eggs is presented as a new type of freedom. But it didn’t feel like it was actually solving the problem. I’m not a woman who loved being pregnant but I’m grateful for the chance to do so and birth my children. In a book about choice, it felt strange to not acknowledge the option that was being taken away.
Karissa Reads Books 
I absolutely know what you mean about not connecting. Last night I went to see the Guillermo del Toro version of Frankenstein, and he lays on the messaging soooo thick. That was annoying, but to connect to what you’re saying, we were supposed to love Elizabeth, and when she dies, we’re supposed to be sad. I wasn’t sad at all. We had little opportunity to connect naturally with her (she’s a cardboard cutout of I’m Not Like Other Girls), and she was so flat that I sat there cringing because I knew I was supposed to be sad because del Toro had pushed all the right buttons, allegedly.