Is this the future of child birth?

Anne Charnock's Dreams Before the Start of Time is a story that speculates on the future of child birth. It uses as its basis the current state of research and development in human reproduction, including egg production, impregnation, genetic modification and artificial wombs.

The story begins in 2034 with friends Millie and Toni. Millie wants a baby and chooses donor insemination because it's not the right time for her partner Aiden. Toni becomes pregnant unintentionally and naturally by her partner Atticus. For the next 75 years the book follows the lives of their children, families, and people who are influenced by their choices.

The most memorable episode is when Millie's son Rudy meets his sperm-donating biological father, a smug, arrogant man. It was a tense and explosive situation. There's also one character who is more interesting than the others, Freya Liddicoat. She has a tenuous link to Millie through an orphan boy that Rudy and his wife didn't adopt. Her working class background makes her stand out from the rest of the middle-class characters.

Apart from these two things, a tense episode and a working class character, the book was forgettable. It's not that their lives weren't happy, it's that, like most families, exciting things rarely happen, they just go about their lives doing normal, everyday things. It's not that the characters were unlikeable, it's that they were too normal. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with the book, it's just that the story was not engaging.