In this day and age of social media and community building, it is difficult for me comprehend how we live out our lives online; personal experience and occasions becomes something to share with friends or followers online. We tumblr the latest fandoms we love on twitter, get into quicky conversations on twitter, and share our dream futures on pinterest. But when does a little becomes too much? Enter: Everybody's Baby by Lydia Netzer.

A couple Jenna and Billy meet, fall in love, get married, and struggle to get pregnant. Their last option is in-vitro fertilization, and after asking his parents for loans to a new house, they don't have the funds themselves for a procedure so expensive yet so deeply wanted. As an app builder and developer, Billy (sparked by an idea that Jenna has) creates a Kickstarter campaign; their goal is raise enough to do IVF and in return give perks to the "Baby Backers" who support their campaign. As the campaign becomes an internet sensation known as the #KickstarterBaby, perks are being sold like hotcakes, and a baby is eventually on the way, their pregnancy becomes everybody's business; quite literally, everybody's baby.

I was surprised that I enjoyed this novella on so many levels; the believably of the kickstarter campaign is extremely current and modern; its narrative is charming, and the questions it raises about our own families versus online communities is something that I'm sure I could write a ten page essay on. Netzer's voice is casual and realistic, and her world was so wonderfully and eerily a reflection of our own internet-obsessed. It's been a long time since I enjoyed a "chick lit" and I'm happy that her book may have me return to a genre that is a long-forgotten guilty pleasure.

As the main character and narrative, Jenna is a likeable protagonist to lead us into her crazy world; sarcastic, witty, introspective, and at a times a bit frustrating. As a young woman who was abandoned by her mother as a child, it was difficult to follow her determination to become a mother and simultaneously put up with a husband - who to me didn't seem to support her or their child at all. As she compares herself to Billy, she is "small and he is big", he is the world and she takes up the corner in a room of "his office" and life. So rarely when she felt she was in danger, or when her nerves were getting the better of her while fulfilling these creepy perks, she didn't speak up to herself and her growing baby until the very end. Jenna wanted a baby, and she got what she wanted in the end - but her doubts and Billy's ignorance made me question how much of the campaign was worth it when she wasn't enjoying it, only seemed to be planning for the birth of the baby to have someone to care for as she wasn't growing up, going through the motions of getting these baby-obsessed strangers out of her life. In their end her journey as a daughter and a mother are fulfilled, which was rewarding - I felt like she was a complex and interesting female character who could be enjoyed on the surface level and studied more of intellectual entertainment too.

But, on the downside of Jenna's journey, there is her husband Billy. If the characterization of her Scottish "cutie" husband was supposed to make me fall in love with him, as much as Jenna was - it didn't. From the beginning, he is ignorant, inattentive, and so usurped by his online following that he never really genuinely seemed to care or was worried about his wife or child. In the very first pages of Jenna meeting and falling in love with Billy, I was frustrated by how his hands and head was glued to his tablets, and their relationship didn't seem to be anything complex or genuine; just that they fell in love. Jenna was willing to invest in their relationship, and Billy was willing to tweet all of their private moments for entertainment to his fans, to fulfill all the perks even at the discomfort of his wife, and that his apps were selling well. Her perspective to me about Billy seemed forced and too forgiving at times. He displayed such a lackadaisical respect for her and their baby, I found it impossible to forgive him just because Jenna loved him and could oversee his "faults".

The perks in the book were definitely creative, original, and at times entertaining, but also made me want to jump inside my shell and never come out which included someone cutting the umbilical cord, naming their child, getting the only copy of the ultrasound picture, knowing the baby's gender before Jenna and Billy, taking home the placenta, and rubbing her pregnant belly. The latter of which Jenna has to spend a day where hundreds of people line up just to touch her. The journey of the couple is exactly how it is played out to the fictional internet world of the novel; you become invested in how the pregnancy will all work out.

And, the ways in which the fictional Baby Backers become so obsessed with Everybody's Baby maybe question and even feel disturbed how much we invest in each other's lives. To a point the Kickstarter campaign is richly current and modern, but also blurred the line of how much people online can be interesting as well as dangerous. When users on different websites were shown to hail Billy as a hero and Jenna "a bitch", and even refer to Jenna's baby as their own, it was gravely disturbing to me how it wasn't really an expressed issue of how much danger Jenna couldn't been in - when people are coming up to their table at dinner asking for autographs, photographers are following her on her way too work etc. Netzer creates a fully-realized world of the internet in its assumption that "we are all a community" but not everyone is sane or has good intentions. Even at the unfolding of the climax and conclusion of the book, I was disappointed that in some ways Jenna's wishes aren't fulfilled for them to live out their lives privately, for their baby to have a normal life after the campaign is over. Infants are now apart of internet history these days; their lives are everyone elses before they are their own. That to me is a bit sad.

In a lot of ways the plausibility of the Kickstarter campaign and the reality of how everyone is now living out their lives online, is one of the biggest reasons - if not the biggest reason, why I liked this book, and it also terrified me. The world in which Jenna and Billy live in is our own; we are glued into following other people's lives. On some levels this seems healthy; to make friends, participate in worthy conversations, kick back and have fun. But when does enough become too much of everyone else's. For me it would be a Kickstarter campaign and technically being co-erced into accepting that a stranger will name my baby after her cats. But, maybe that's just me....