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Overview
Here is the perfect novel for everyone who ever felt manipulated and lied to in a relationship, for everyone who ever thought they were sane and it was the doctors and psychiatrists who should be locked up, for everyone who ever wished for the perfect, low-maintenance baby, and for everyone who ever had doubts about how far medical science should go - regardless of how far it could go. Moira Sugden, long-term resident of the Manxheath Institute of Challenged Stability, and her daughters Hazel and Linda are the ideal dysfunctional family. Hazel's husband Gregory is a gynecologist who is developing a "perfect baby" drug by experimenting on both his unsuspecting wife and his complicit mistress; Hazel's 4-year-old son - a result of Gregory's experiments - is communicating telepathically with his institutionalized grandmother; and Hazel's sister Linda has become a groupie of a seductive televangelist. When Hazel finally learns the awful truth about her husband's research, she joins forces with her mother and sister to get even with the men who are controlling their lives. Too late to stop the birth of the perfect baby. But not too late for a piercingly funny and blackly ironic revenge on genetic engineering and the born-again church.Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
Fertility, televangelism and psychiatry froth in the test tube of this wacky comic debut by British novelist Jensen. English homemaker Hazel Stevenson is certain that her gynecologist husband, Gregory, is having an affair with Dr. Ruby Gonzalez, his lovely and possibly pregnant colleague at the Fertility Management Center, where Gregory is busy creating a drug that will "deselect" any but the most perfect fetus. The British tabloid press has dubbed it the "perfect baby drug"; the Reverend Vernon Carmichael of TV's Holy Hour thinks Gregory is a tool of the devil-an assessment Hazel is inclined to agree with when she discovers that their four-year-old son, Billy, is the result of an early experiment. Determined to expose Gregory, Hazel enlists the help of Dr. Ishmael Stern of the Manxheath Institute of Challenged Stability, where her paranoid schizophrenic mother, Moira Sugden, is a patient. But Dr. Stern's help includes a course of "enhanced vitamins" that results in Hazel being committed to Manxheath. That leaves her sister, Linda, Assistant Manager (Butter Sub-Unit) of the government's Edible Fats Policy, as the only member of the Sugden family free of psychiatric bondage. And it's she who comes up with the consummate plan to foil Gregory, Ruby and their newborn perfect baby. Yes, the story is often overwhelmed by delusions, hallucinations and trips through altered reality. But Jensen has a real gift for wickedly black humor-and enough stylistic panache to hold a reader's attention firmly through the thicket of her excesses. (Mar.)Book Details
Published
June 1, 1997
Publisher
Overlook Press
Pages
288
Format
Paperback
ISBN
9780879517847