At first Puffball will remind you of Rosemary's Baby. Liffey Lee-Fox talks her pompous husband Richard into moving to the country …; in exchange she will become pregnant…. [One of the neighbors] Mabs is—a witch. When Liffey becomes pregnant, Mabs jealously tries first to induce a miscarriage and finally to kill her. But here the book's resemblance to a superficial thriller ceases, for Liffey's baby, in utero, becomes a force for Good and manages to blunt Mabs's schemes. Still the pregnancy is touch-and-go 'til the very end, and Weldon treats the reader to a deliciously exasperating scene as Liffey's labor begins. The characters are every bit as good as the plot. Weldon manages to present, then skewer, almost every human foible attributable to selfishness and pettiness.

Nor is that all there is to it. Weldon has the audacity to include technical information on fertility, conception, and fetal development...