Gerbil Mother asks readers to overcome an impossible premise: that a fetus, age zero, can be a conscious, thinking, seeing thing. A narrator, even. One named Gerbil.

Calgary-based D.M. Bryan’s first novel is a story about family dynamics, told through the eyes of an unborn child, and it’s a book that may make pro-life advocates jump for joy. For it is the celebration of life, in all its grungy and spongy aspects that is explored, in utero, in the pages of Gerbil Mother.

Tristram Shandy, which also gets its start in a sac of amniotic fluid, this is not. But the writing, especially when dealing with the domestic toil and drudgery of being a mom, is pretty much bang-on. The love/contempt that Maeve (Gerbil’s mother) has for her overbearing and difficult son Nick are the kinds of acute emotions only a parent – especially a mother – could understand. The depiction of Maeve’s love for Mahon, the father of Gerbil and Nick, is also a strength of the book, lending a sense of weight and narrative counterbalance to what is predominantly Maeve’s point of view, as told through Gerbil.

The difficulty of the book really lies with Gerbil. For someone who contemplates a burgeoning universe with “doubting paws,” Gerbil is one ridiculously smart embryo, describing one character as “blubber[ing] into her hands until her nose swells and reddens, until her eyes puff, until her lip crenellates.” Crenellates? Part of the difficulty in accepting Gerbil as the narrator is the frenetic inconsistency of his voice, which makes the leap of imagination more difficult.