The Swallow’s Nest is such a classic example of women’s fiction that, were you to look the genre up in a dictionary, you might see a picture of this book’s cover as the definition.  It’s got unexpected motherhood, marital infidelity, a custody battle, cancer, evil mother figures, and prose right out of the Iris Rainer Dart school, made to be swallowed down between gulps of beer and bites of chocolate while the ocean sucks your beach towel out to sea.  Your enjoyment of the story at large will depend on how strong your stomach is for cliché.

But, dear reader, stomach it I could not.

After her husband Graham Randolph finally enters remission after a long battle with Burkitt’s Lymphoma, lifestyle blogger and design consultant Lilia Swallow throws a huge party to celebrate.  Right in the middle of the festivities, an unfamiliar woman arrives, hands Lilia a three-month old baby, snarls about Graham’s secret-keeping and the difficulties of single motherhood, and flees the scene.  That child – a boy named Toby – is the result of a one-night-stand between Graham and Marina Tate, a business colleague who fell into his bed due to an act of selfishness on his part and one of foolish hope on hers.  After a year or so, Lilia has adjusted well to motherhood, but Graham ignores his follow-up appointments, the return of his lymphoma goes unnoticed – and it kills him.  Lilia had delayed formalizing the adoption of Toby, leaving a window open for the other women in Graham’s life to stake a claim – which Marina does with the assistance of Graham’s own mother, Ellen, who bankrolls Marina’s custody scheme in the hope of making up for the cold, distant relationship she had with Graham by co-parenting her grandson.  Lilia must rely on her close friends – including lawyer Carrick Donnelly, who threatens to become much more to her – if she wants to maintain a civil relationship with Marina for the sake of her now-beloved stepson.

This book opens with a labored metaphor featuring Lilia’s beloved childhood dog, Haimi, burying coconuts in her family’s back yard.  Unlike Haimi, it seems, the sweetest parts of life have been inaccessible to Liila.  The corn factor doesn’t decrease from there.

Our characters are walking stereotypes straight out of casting for an 80s weepie.  Lilia is the Perfect Mother who, after a brief and justified time resenting her husband’s choices – for which the narrative constantly browbeats her –  morphs from someone reluctant to be a parent to a cookie-baking, child-loving secular saint.  Lilia is proud to be Hawaiian, and the book tries to explore her heritage in a realistic way; but this part of her mostly seems to involve stuff the author learned while surfing Wikipedia and most often is used as cheap scenery porn.  One of the novel’s few saving graces is the portrayal of her romance with Carrick, but the narrative is so painfully obvious when it comes to the fact that it’s going to happen that it’s impossible to be surprised.

Marina is the White Trash Rival.  A dysfunctional childhood, nonexistent parental influence, selfishly hoping to steal the heroine’s husband… you name the cliché and Marina is a perfect simulacrum of it. At least we briefly glimpse the notion through her relationship with the guy she eventually marries that it’s all right not to want to have children – oh, no wait,  once she notices that Toby’s out of his screaming babyhood phase she wants to get to know him.  It’s generally her job to constantly screw up, and her final bad choice adds unnecessary third act drama to the story, concluding  the tale with her Ultimate Redemption.  Oh, and all of her ne’er-do-well relatives are overweight drunks, which is the author’s shorthand for ‘white trash’.

Ellen is the Icy Grandmother Who Thaws Through Exposure To Love. In the beginning of the book she is so unlikable that she actually says that one needs to instruct babies how to feel and alternates between self-pity and concerns about impropriety. By the middle of her arc, when she goes into partnership with an old friend and becomes a house flipper, she actually becomes quite likable and interesting.  Her husband is barely worth mentioning as a cardboard cartoon villain with absolutely no nuance.

Graham is the Plot Convenience Douchebag First Husband.  Stricken with cancer, he childishly wants a child right away, and when Lilia says no, he turns to Marina, whom he blatantly exploits to make himself “feel like a man, not a man with cancer” (his words).  The novel even tells us that he froze his sperm, should the worst befall his gonads (a plot device the author tragically does not dare exploit), and yet still expects us to sympathize with him because he acted out of depression over his illness, using half of his trust fund to hush up Marina because he was SO afraid of losing Lilia.  My patrician heart, I assure you, is breaking.  In the end, Graham himself is no more than a plot device, existing only to cause Lilia angst and produce a child before kicking off for the great hereafter. The novel would have done well to simply start after his death and forget the remission part of the plot entirely.   When he died, I applauded.

Yet the characters could have been saints and still failed to pull together this utter mess of an antiquated plot.  Its message is simple: infidelity, gross emotional deception and manipulation are absolutely fine, if the result is an adorable toddler and some form of self-growth.  The narrative voice brings up many of the points I made above, but second-guesses and excuses itself.  How Lilia actually feels about motherhood doesn’t matter, because Babies Fix Everything.  How she feels about her marriage doesn’t matter, because everyone is really, truly flawed and when someone breaks your trust at a fundamental level, you should grit your teeth and get through it.  If your husband is immature and has been avoiding fatherhood for months, just leave him alone with the baby for a couple of weeks and he’ll transform into someone who will throw himself through a window’ to protect the baby.  If you’re unable to bond with your child, if you just plain don’t think you like kids, keep forcing yourself to parent them until The Feels kick in.  Oh and don’t get medication for your post-partum depression, either.   The narrative tries to poke at deeper matters; the notion that Graham slept with a blonde white woman to be properly assured that he’d end up with a blond, blue-eyed baby, Ellen’s belief that her only identity in life is as her husband’s trophy and her shame and disgust at Lilia’s pride in her Hawaiian roots  – but none of this is material to the central themes of the novel.   The only time it ever rings true when it comes to parenthood is in Marina’s mixed reaction to Toby; otherwise, no matter what shit happens, it’s doesn’t matter in the end because – as Ellen actually says – “babies’ smiles are magic.”  .