This new novel imagines every IVF parent’s worst nightmare

FICTION
The Mix-Up
Kylie Ladd
Penguin, $34.99

If Kylie Ladd’s characters came together to make a documentary about their lives, the film could be called The Unfortunates.

Her novels centre on people who have been subjected to unspeakable pain, grief and wildly unexpected scenarios. In her latest, sixth novel, The Mix-Up, two middle-class couples, each having endured gruelling health battles to become parents, discover that their babies are, in fact, not their own: there was a mix-up in the laboratory on the day they had their embryo transfers.

It’s the stuff of nightmares that has happened to couples in real life. Will they switch their children after 14 years? Or continue to live as they are?

Ladd begins the story from one of the teenager’s perspectives. Ammy, the (apparent) child of Kelsey and Raf, who are now separated, is a thoughtless, impulsive menace, too cool for school, fiercely determined to butt heads with anyone who gets in her way.

Her insatiable itch to grow up wreaks havoc on her mother’s sensitive temperament. A kindergarten teacher who is “undone” by children, Kelsey’s overprotective nature is constantly tested by her only child, who was once desired so maddeningly that her mother had endured multiple rounds of IVF, putting her and her former husband into decades-long debt. As Ammy enters her 15th year, mother and daughter become increasingly and brutally unalike in their temperaments, opinions and appearances.

The unexpected (and unwanted) day of reckoning comes after Ammy’s science project, involving, predictably, a family tree and genetic testing kit, reveals the truth. The child shares none of her parents’ DNA. How does this enormous, shocking new information change the way you see yourself?

Enter Zac, a short, introverted Minecraft enthusiast who has also felt different from his domineering father. Unlike Nathan, a blue-chip alpha male who adores corporate golf days, Zac is a sweet, gentle, dedicated student, a fourth-generation Bayside Grammar boy who is struggling under the legacy left by his once star student father.