WickedGirl's Book Notes

When food poisoning strikes an entire wedding party, the only two people who can use the honeymoon trip are the bride's sister and the groom's brother - who can't stand each other.

Emma Donoghue's contribution to Amazon's Out of Line collection imagines a 2060 in which the climate crisis has been answered by a society that strongly disincentivizes having children - and Miriam, who has accepted the rules her whole life, finds at a work retreat that she and a coworker named Ned both want what almost no one is allowed to want anymore.

A tech reporter's misdirected email connects two women eight thousand miles apart - both named Sandra Guzman, both contract content moderators for the same mega social media platform, one in New Jersey and one in the Philippines - and the friendship that grows between them across the inbox starts to look, by the end, like the beginning of a campaign.

Caroline Kepnes's contribution to Amazon's Out of Line collection sends an exhausted, recently-fired new mother named Shelby chasing a Hallmark-movie fantasy with a secret admirer - and lands her, in a darkly comic Stepford Wives-meets-The Prisoner pivot, on a rehabilitation ranch for women classified W2 who must be retrained into W1 before they're allowed to go home.

In Roxane Gay's short, administrative dystopia, every girl is tested at sixteen to see whether the state will license her to have a child of her own; Hadley failed, so she goes to the baby library, where unlicensed women can borrow an infant girl on a two-week loan.

An Ancestry.com match arrives in the inbox of a woman who has spent forty-plus years pretending the baby she gave up for adoption in 1964 never existed - and Cheryl Strayed traces, in a tight short story for Amazon's Out of Line collection, what happens when a teenager named Geraldine Waters has to integrate the life she actually lived with the one she's been telling.