Mila Torres is a successful D.C. divorce attorney who moonlights as a stand-up comic. She’s 35, pansexual, single, and pretty happy with her life. That is, until her gynecologist suggests that she consider freezing her eggs just in case she wants kids later. Mila suddenly realizes she wants a kid now, partner or no.
She’s leery of spending money on a sperm bank, and jumps at a friend’s suggestion that she use Baby Bank, an app “like Tinder, but for free sperm.” After much swiping, she finds a match. He’s handsome, smart, and there’s even a Facebook group for the families he’s helped create. He seems perfect—except that he’s also the brother of Arielle Elliot, a reporter who’s been hounding Mila about a case involving one of her clients, a conservative, anti-choice politician who may have had an affair with an intern. Ari wants to expose the affair, and wants Mila’s inside scoop, which would cause Mila to violate client confidentiality.
Mila nevertheless gets pregnant (on the first try!), and things get more complicated when Mila and Ari develop feelings for each other. (That’s in the jacket blurb, so it’s not really a spoiler.) Mila also has to navigate her loving but complicated relationship with her own mother, Chicky Torres, who dropped out of college to raise Mila alone and sees being a single parent as something to avoid. Mila’s close friends are supportive of her, though, and provide an entertaining set of secondary characters.
Some of the coincidences in the book strain belief, like the fact that Mila’s donor turns out to be Ari’s brother. (There’s also another coincidence involving an Uber driver, which I won’t spoil.) And a few errors stand out: Chicky is described both as having been “a nineteen-year-old pregnant college dropout” and having been “twenty years old” when she conceived Mila. Also, although nothing is said of this in the book, the Washington Times is actually a conservative paper. It feels wrong that Ari, not a conservative person in politics or persona, works for that paper and wants to use it to expose an anti-choice, conservative politician.
I’ll also note that while there’s a mention of a non-genetic parent being put on a child’s birth certificate, with the implication that that makes her a legal parent, we should remember that that’s not enough for secure legal parentage that is recognized everywhere. The book doesn’t need to be a how-to for doing so, but some mention that a co-parent or step-parent adoption was on the horizon might help dispel misconceptions.
A “Bonus Scene” of Mila’s birth experience feels like it should have been included in the body of the story or omitted. Stuck on the end, it feels as if author Sarah Robinson, who self-published the book, couldn’t decide whether to incorporate it.
Readers who can suspend their disbelief over the coincidences and overlook the few errors, however, will find themselves on a fun and funny ride. The characters are engaging, there’s a hot two-woman romance, and an affirming (if accelerated) storyline about a single queer woman starting a family. The best part of the story, I think, is that it conveys a sense of how ties of both genetic and chosen families mix and mingle for many people today. Not all donor family networks are as welcoming as the one Mila finds herself in—but we get a glimpse here of what might be possible.
Mila refers to herself as both “Latinx” and “Hispanic” (although “Latinx” is not a term used by most people of Latin American origin in the U.S.) Ari is Asian.
