Jenna and Billy are in love. He's an app developer, a hyper-plugged-in citizen of the internet, with a big Scottish family and winning smile. She is a yoga teacher, tuned in to the vibes of the spiritual universe, who was abandoned by her mother as an infant and orphaned by her father's recent death. When they meet, it's electric, and it is no time before they are married and eager to start their own family. But when they can't get pregnant, Billy devises a plan: they would raise funds for their in vitro fertilization on Kickstarter, offering donor perks like cutting the cord, naming the baby, and catching the baby when it takes its first steps. The good news is that they make their fundraising goal, get pregnant and have a baby! The bad news is that their marriage begins to fall apart when they have to deliver on all those perks. It's hard enough to survive delivering a baby without a performance artist making a documentary of the cord cutting. It's difficult enough to get baby to sit up and smile for a six month portrait without a local politician taking up half the lens. What does it mean to be owned by the internet? Lydia Netzer's Everybody's Baby explores how relationships grow and fail in public and private life, the hazards of living "in the cloud," and the nature of love online and off.
"No one writes like the brilliant Lydia Netzer; she's a visionary with a huge voice and an impeccable ear for language. HOW TO TELL TOLEDO FROM THE NIGHT SKY evokes an Ohio where math has married mysticism, where a woman at war with falling in love can find herself flying into it instead, where a man will fight both his demons and his deities to finally connect. It's a powerful reinvention of the
Joshilyn Jackson, New York Times bestselling author of A Grown Up Kind of Pretty
"Lydia Netzer has a refreshing way of looking at the world that captivates me--it's as if she's leading me to a grassy hill far from the lights of a noisy city and there we lie on our backs, hands behind our heads, and stare at the star-pricked night sky in wide-eyed wonder. In her novels, she combines math, magic, and science in a unique alchemy that gives us an entirely new kind of love story.
David Abrams, author of Fobbit, on How to Tell Toledo From the Night Sky
"Not only entertaining, but nuanced and wise…blending wit and imagination with an oddly mesmerizing, matter-of-fact cadence...a delightfully unique love story and a resounding paean to individuality."
