Fetal Position

by Carolyn Huynh

From the author of the Good Morning America Book Club Pick The Fortunes of Jaded Women comes a heart-pounding speculative novel in which a burnt-out corporate woman joins a startup that promises domestic ease and meaning through enforced motherhood—but as women begin to disappear, she must confront the violent cost of complicity before the state-sanctioned solution claims her body for good.

Set moments in the near future, “high-value” intelligent women are recruited by a mysterious start-up called Hatch to become traditional wives, to help combat the historically low birthrate and the male loneliness epidemic.

The incentives? You’ll no longer have to work your corporate job, you’ll get a subsidized house, land, and a robot butler that’ll do all your errands and domestic labor for you. The catch? You simply trade in your corporate labor for child labor—through being inseminated with organic sperm through a male match.

When Lena Do receives a mystery invite to Hatch, she leaves behind everything she’s ever known to join a cause she’s been taught her whole life to hate. But when women start disappearing and dying around her, she races against the clock to uncover the truth behind the company before her insemination is successful, and she’s trapped forever.

With biting social critique, Fetal Position examines survival, complicity, and the chilling reality of what happens when government policies decide who deserves love—and who deserves to live.

Genres: Dystopia, Asian Literature

256 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication December 8, 2026

About the author

Carolyn Huynh is a novelist, screenwriter, and playwright. She loves writing about unhinged women who never learn from their mistakes, but yearn for joy. A homegrown Californian, she resides in Los Angeles with her partner, daughter, and demon girl dog. When she’s not writing, Carolyn daydreams about having iced coffee on a rooftop in Ho Chi Minh City.

Reviews

[Mai H. · Rating 5 out of 5]

ANHPI Month 2026 #6

Carolyn's first book is an in-depth discourse about women in the Vietnamese diaspora, set up and down the west coast.

Her second features the racism and struggles Vietnamese refugees had to face in a small fishing village near Houston.

This book goes in a completely different direction, taking AI and the tradwife narrative and giving it a very Vietnamese American spin. It's giving Silvia Moreno-Garcia.

Part 1: Red

I am obsessed with the tradwife discourse. I have at least two other books on my shelves dedicated to this topic.

In a near world where men are bottom feeders, Lena is a "high-value intelligent woman" that is exhausted from the corporate grind. Her yellow eyes deem her as other, namely that her mother used artificial sperm to create her.

Pippa is a peppy blonde mom of four sons for Hatch, a semi-secretive startup where women are taught to leave behind their hatred for men and expected to rest their bodies for insemination with "natural" sperm.

Here the men aren't degraded. Here they are allowed some freedoms, such as choosing the gender of their future children. All the children at Hatch, from babies to age four, are boys.

We meet James, Lena's match. Every so often, something causes Lena's memory to glitch. Let's hold onto this for later. When it happens with James, she overlooks it, but I didn't.

Who is he? Why are they given the nicest house at Hatch? What was her mother really doing in her lab? Can we trust the AI bots?

Part 2: White

I powered through this part and the next, because 1) the mystery is eating at me and 2) I was on a plane and decided not to work.

Who are Ori's parents? Why is his name making my ears ring like Lena's? Am I AI enhanced? Just kidding.

I'm very curious as to Pippa and Martha's roles in this whole endeavor. Every time I see a "women supporting women" meme I shake my head, because women do not support women.

I won't lie. I never trusted James. I'm not even sure who first said this to me, and my dad loves repeating it, but "he's just a man."

How are the Domexes involved? Obviously, we can't trust the bots. But how much can't we trust the bots?

And this is where it gets interesting. When Lena stumble upon the boys, namely Ori, he is far more intelligent than his age suggests. And the recruited mothers are getting dumber by the day. Are the children inheriting intelligence? Or stealing it?

I suppose we can go back to Pippa and Martha, and the role of women as a whole. Not that I think Pippa is smart enough to back anything solid, but why is a board of women promoting the creation of intelligent boys? It's giving blue pill women.

Lena's brain goes through it best when it's not glitching. What happened to the other women? Why are the rest of the women getting dumber and losing their learned skills? Did the women that left really leave? Did they die?

Part 3: Blue

I knew they were stealing intelligence from the women. I'm so smart. I'd get conned by Hatch, too. How does one live a life of leisure without having to birth four sons?

In wanting to know who was behind this, I knew we couldn't trust a certain man. He's based on a tech billionaire. Make your guesses as to which one. The man is literally insane.

Fantastic dystopian discourse aside, I think my favorite part of this book is that Lena can just be Vietnamese American without the whole book being about that. We're given Lena's surname in Part 1. Her mom makes her thit kho (not named as such, IYKYK) in Part 3. And that's basically it.

On that note, I'd say this is more about fragile masculinity than race. Men should be lonelier.

📱 Thank you to NetGalley and Atria Books

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fetal Position by Fetal Position was the kind of dystopian novel that made me uncomfortable in a way that felt intentional and honestly a little too realistic for comfort.

As someone who raised her daughter to be independent, ambitious, and never define her worth through a man, this book hit a nerve for me. The entire concept of women being gently manipulated back into “traditional roles” under the disguise of comfort, luxury, and fulfillment was honestly terrifying. Carolyn Huynh takes the tradwife narrative, corporate burnout, AI, loneliness, and reproductive politics and twists them into something that feels believable enough to make you stop and think.

Lena Do is exhausted from the nonstop corporate grind and gets pulled into Hatch, a company promising women a softer, easier life through motherhood and domesticity. At first glance, Hatch almost sounds appealing—beautiful homes, financial stability, robot assistants, no more hustle culture. But underneath all of it is this unsettling message that women should shrink themselves to solve society’s problems and make men feel important again.

That’s where this book really worked for me.

I appreciated that Lena wasn’t written as weak for wanting rest or connection. She’s lonely, burned out, emotionally complicated, and trying to figure out where she belongs. But the story never loses sight of how dangerous it becomes when women are pushed to sacrifice their intelligence, independence, and identity for the comfort of others.

The atmosphere throughout the book is incredibly creepy without relying on nonstop action. There’s this constant feeling that something is wrong. The memory glitches, the AI bots, the disappearing women, the strange behavior of the children—it all slowly builds into something much darker than I expected.

I did figure out parts of the twist fairly early, and there were moments where the pacing felt repetitive for me, which kept this from being a full 5-star read. But overall, I was still very invested in the bigger commentary and flew through the second half.

What I also loved was that Lena’s Vietnamese American identity existed naturally within the story without becoming the entire story. It added depth without overshadowing the dystopian themes.

This book feels like a warning wrapped inside speculative fiction. It’s about power, control, loneliness, capitalism, fragile masculinity, and the ways society still tries to convince women that becoming smaller is somehow the answer.

And personally? I’ll always root for women choosing their own success, their own identity, and their own future—regardless of what a man or society says they should want.

[Jenny · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book had such a fascinating premise: what if we actually overcame the patriarchy and women were superior to men. Well, for one, the fertility rates would drop immensely as women were the big wigs in all jobs imaginable. Our main character, Lena, is one of these big wigs but decides to leave it all and take herself and her past traumas to Hatch. We follow her through her inner dialogue and outer experiences as she joins in the movement to have women slow down and feel less lonely. But there are robots and bigger schemes going on.

All in all, the book was good. I did feel like I was getting dragged back and forth from her past and present timelines without actually gleaning new information; most of Lena’s past experiences with her mom all hinted at the one big “secret” about her, though it felt easy to catch early early on.

Thank you, NetGalley and Atria Books, for the ARC read in exchange for my honest review.

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. I am STUNNED. This is the most creative, most on point, most realistically terrifying dystopian novel I have ever read. I immediately purchased the author’s prior two novels after finishing this ARC. I cannot put into words what an amazing author Carolyn Huynh is. She is an absolute genius and the way she crafted this entire story from start to finish should be studied by anyone thinking of entering the dystopian genre.

I don’t want to give anything away by saying too much in this review, because I believe going into it somewhat blind is what makes the story that much more impactful, but know that you will not be disappointed OR feel like there isn’t a resolution at the end. You will be nodding your head in satisfaction while picking your jaw up off the floor.

Genius.

Pure genius.

**This ARC was provided by the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.**

[Carolyn Huynh]

Dear readers!

Allow me to introduce my third book. It's a complete genre shift (grounded sci-fi /smidge of dystopia) from my previous works, but hopefully you can still see me in the subtext. I hope you enjoy and thank you for coming along for the ride.

All my gratitude -Carolyn