Casual
ByPublisher Description
One of LitHub's Most Anticipated Books of 2025!
"Eerily believable, incredibly relatable and heartbreaking."
- Booklist
About CASUAL:
Valya's neural implant is amazing.
Its game-like app, CASUAL, has managed her depression and anxiety, stabilized her mood, and helped the infertile Valya get pregnant. But new laws forbid her from using the device when she's sole caregiver for her infant. Her gaslighting ex won't help her, and she can't afford a nanny, so her obstetrician insists that Valya wean off CASUAL before giving birth.
Despite a will to quit and a supportive new love interest in her birthing class, disabling CASUAL turns Valya's anxiety into full-blown panic attacks. Her psychiatrist offers to enroll her in a controversial clinical trial that would place a tandem implant in the baby and allow Valya to keep hers active. Valya must decide whether she should attempt parenting without CASUAL or install a minimally tested device in her vulnerable child.
Casual is a stark and cutting glance at a near future that looks uncannily like our present, exploring themes of bodily autonomy and the struggle for mental health in a world increasingly divided.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesCasual Reviews
Rachel
Created 5 months agoChristina G
Created 8 months agogabby
Created 8 months agoJustin M.
Created 8 months ago
“A book with many questions, few answers, and little judgment to those who find themselves in that jungle of pressure. The world is richly and emotionally detailed: its technology, economy, and ecology are strange but recognizable, like the logical conclusions of familiar conversations today.
The central drama of the plot---whether a pregnant woman would agree to an experimental trial---unrolls slowly, in small, back-and-forth steps as the majority of attention is on the peripheral parts of the mother's life that push her in either direction. This decision is certainly big, but the pace of the story (full of flashbacks and side notes) almost makes it read like a slice of life instead of a drama. Like the gestating baby, it's on its own schedule.
Still chewing on how it resolves, even as I write this. Not that I outright disagree with any character motivations, but reflecting on how the pacing of revelations set the stage for what eventually happens.”Cozy Chrissy
Created 8 months agoStart a Book Club
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