Amazon.com Review
The road through infertility and assisted reproduction is long and lonely, and couples going through its grueling medical procedures desperately need to hear the stories of successful parents.
Conceiving Luc: A Family Story is one of these needed books, and it's both informational and deeply emotional. Liza Freilicher and her husband David went through years of operations, injections, and IVF (in vitro fertilization) procedures in a quest for a baby, until Liza's cousin Jennifer offered to serve as their gestational carrier. Jennifer was implanted with the couple's fertilized embryo and carried their baby to term.
Conceiving Luc is told through Liza's narration and Jennifer's journal entries, as each woman goes through her own physical and emotional ordeal to bring Luc into the world. The women were always close as children, but their relationship becomes increasingly tense as the pregnancy progresses, though the experience ultimately brings them, and their husbands, closer together than ever. While too much of the book revolves around Liza's ambivalence about parenthood and flashbacks to the cousins in earlier years, Conceiving Luc becomes a truly unique tale once Jennifer's generous offer is accepted. The Freilichers' heart-rending experience of infertility and fertility treatment is fascinating, as are Jennifer's story and motivations. As a story of an extended family's quest for continued closeness and as an inspiration for couples struggling with fertility problems, this story (cowritten by Liza's mother, Suzanne Wetanson) is a positive addition to the new field of literature created by the increasing use of assisted reproduction. --Ericka Lutz
From Publishers Weekly
Though it offers readers an emotion-drenched narrative about family bonds, this collaboration elucidates very little about the larger issues of medical ethics raised by the story. Freilicher and her husband, David, wanted desperately to have a childAand they didn't want to adopt. When the traditional method failed, they tried in-vitro fertilization. When that failed twice, they were ready to give up. But Scheu, Freilicher's cousin, offered to be the gestational carrier of David and Liza's baby. The tale of how that baby, Luc, came into the world is told by Freilicher, Scheu and Wetanson (Freilicher's mother). As children, Freilicher and Scheu were "best friends forever" but they had a falling out during adolescence. The writing is riddled with clich?s and a rather maudlin emotionalism, and some readers may be irked that Scheu's offer seems to have been motivated as much by her own psychological needs as by generosity, in particular her desire to come to terms with the death of her own mother. In a letter to Freilicher, she wrote: "You will cure my pain and I will cure yours. Then you and I can stand together and stop being the hateful brats we are." Most readers, however, will be moved by the ties that bind Freilicher and Scheu and their respective (and mutual) extended families, and by the overwhelming level of familial love that runs through the book. 8 pages b&w photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
