Josh and Gemma Make a Baby - Sarah Ready

Josh and Gemma Make a Baby

By Sarah Ready

  • Release Date: 2022-01-25
  • Genre: Romantic Comedies
Score: 4.5
4.5
From 63 Ratings

Description

New Year's Resolution:

Have a baby

Preferably with Josh Lewenthal

Meet Gemma Jacobs. She's driven, energetic, and a positive thinker. She has a great career working for famed self-help guru Ian Fortune, she lives in a cute studio apartment in Manhattan, and her family is supportive and loving (albeit a little kooky). Her life is perfect. Absolutely wonderful.

Except for one tiny little thing.

After a decade of disastrous relationships and an infertility diagnosis, Gemma doesn't want a Mr. Right (or even a Mr. Right Now), she just wants a baby.

And all she needs is an egg, some sperm, and IVF.

So Gemma makes a New Year's resolution: have a baby.

Josh Lewenthal is a laid back, relaxed, find-the-humor-in-life kind of guy. The polar opposite of Gemma. He's also her brother's best friend. For the past twenty years Josh has attended every Jacobs' family birthday, holiday, and event – he's always around.

Gemma knows him. He's nice (enough), he's funny (-ish), he's healthy (she thinks) and he didn't burn any ants with a magnifying glass as a kid. Which, in Gemma's mind, makes him the perfect option for a sperm donor.

So Gemma wants to make a deal. An unemotional, businesslike arrangement. No commitments, just a baby.

To Gemma's surprise, Josh agrees.

They have nothing in common, except their agreement to make a baby and their desire to keep things businesslike.

But the thing about baby-making…it's hard to keep it businesslike, it's nearly impossible to keep it unemotional, and it's definitely impossible to keep your heart out of the mix. Because when you're making a baby together, things have a way of starting to feel like you're making other things too – like a life, and a family, and love. And when the baby-making ends, you wish that everything else didn't have to end too.

Reviews

  • Making a baby

    5
    By 112950
    Very well written enjoyed this story
  • Completely loved

    5
    By Rinsky13
    Sarah Ready has become one of my favs, and here is one of the reasons why. She gives you stories with heart, with LAUGHTER, with all the emotions wrapped up all in one. Josh and Gemma, they stole my heart and gave me life. And what I needed at the moment
  • Not my favorite by this author

    3
    By Cheryl33610
    I really wanted to love this book. I like the author, the premise sounded interesting, and I was looking forward to the IVF journey of the characters, as I have friends who have been through it themselves. Josh was great, even as he wasn’t exactly honest with his feelings. His fake “everything is great” smile got tedious after a while. He’s more complex than he seems on the surface, but those qualities were very slow in being revealed. Gemma seems intelligent and hardworking, but she’s also naive and a bit of a snob. She’s as guilty of looking down on Josh for her mistaken view of him as all the idiots in her town…and family…are of dismissing her because she’s infertile, divorced, “overweight” and in her 30’s. I hated this misogynistic bull. Fat shaming, age shaming…shaming in general is just a complete hard pass for me. Why is this thought to be a good plot device? Basically, her family…or should I say her mom, mostly…sucks. One apology for years of making her feel bad? Nope. I haven’t even addressed the plot holes in the IVF journey. This woman lives in a 500 sq foot apartment but can pay for IVF? And get an appointment right away? And doesn’t absolutely no research before blithely deciding she’s going to have a baby this way? Obviously, this wasn’t the book for me. I just can’t suspend belief to this degree. I obviously know that watching a billionaire fall in love in one week with a bookish librarian is a far-fetched story. But when dealing with issues such as IVF and fertility, I really need more fact-based reality. Some readers obviously loved this book, while others did not. I’ve read other books by Sarah Ready which I have enjoyed. I won’t be abandoning her, but just chalking this book up to a difference in opinion.