Title: Fallow
Author: Sarah Anderson
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication Date: September 15, 2026
Genres: Science Fiction
Length: 433 pages
Source: I borrowed it from the library.
Rating: 3 Stars
Blurb:
Slyly funny and disarmingly tender, Fallow is the story of a young woman who signs up to be the world’s first in-house corporate surrogate, then finds herself caught up in a social experiment of another kind.
Natalie knows one truth: There is no such thing as a good job.
As the clock ticks away at the workplace harassment call center, she tries to ignore the increasing pain in her jaw. She has no dental insurance. She has no skills or ambitions. She has student loans. And, minute by minute, she hears the many ways workers are not just not getting by, but actually getting hustled.
Then, at the blood bank where she sells her plasma, a mysterious flyer leads her to The Company. Natalie turns out to be the perfect candidate for their pilot in-house surrogate. The Company pitches it as an opportunity to help women access greater gender equity, motherhood without maternity leave. Finally, she will be adequately—generously—compensated.
For years, her every need is stacks of healthy meals in the refrigerator of a luxury condo, fitness coaches and nutritionists, around-the-clock healthcare. Between deliveries, she takes time off—no obligations or expectations. For the first time in her life, she is good at her job; for the first time, she feels free.
But just as she’s about to fulfill the terms of her contract, a staffing decision upends everything and drags her deep into another social experiment. There she meets new questions about her future, her freedom, her purpose, and what she can expect from the world.
Woundingly funny and deeply moving, Sarah Anderson’s Fallow is a tender, hilarious, alarmingly real vision of a woman balancing on the knife-edge of capitalism as she comes to realize who she wants to be.
Content Warning: Commercial surrogacy. References to abortion. Birth. Forceps used in a difficult birth. Kidnapping.
Review:
Fertility is a gift.
I appreciated how much time the author spent exploring the many ways in which surrogacy can go wrong, particularly commercial surrogacy. This is a complex topic that can’t possibly be fully covered in a review, but there are many ethical and medical dilemmas that can come about when someone is paid to carry another person’s fertilized egg. For example, Natalie dealt with multiple couples who wanted to control every facet of her life while she was pregnant, from which precise combinations of foods she ate every day for nine months to which medical tests and procedures she was either forbidden from doing or forced to do. There were much darker moments of the influence they expected to have over her mind and body as well, but I’ll leave those passages for other readers to discover for themselves.
There was a plot twist a little over halfway into this book involving the main character that I found difficult to believe due to how passive she was during what should have been a terrifying ordeal. It almost felt like a completely different story altogether because of how much the tone changed and how little the protagonist’s personality shone through those circumstances. It would have been helpful to have some foreshadowing about what was going on there, particularly as it was related to Natalie’s plans for the future once her seventh and final pregnancy was completed.
It was nice to have such realistic world building, especially given some of the later developments in the storyline that may have otherwise seemed a bit far fetched. This felt like something that could really happen in our world in a few years, albeit with a few slight shifts to the ways western society works. There is definitely something to be said for science fiction that nudges things enough to create interesting conflicts while still feeling true to current societal trends in so many different countries, so kudos to the author for that.
Fallow was thought provoking.
1. A full-body massage from a professional masseuse.
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I love them!
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