“A young woman, imprisoned underground with thirty-nine other females and guarded by silent armed men, must navigate freedom after escaping her cage in a ravaged world.”
One of my favorite questions that science fiction can ask us is what makes us human. Usually, I see this in stories with cyborgs and aliens but here there’s none of that, at least there doesn’t seem to be. In this book we see humanity stripped down to its core. A young girl who is a nameless narrator, has only known life in a windowless bunker with thirty-nine other women and a handful of male guards. She has no parents and she has never seen the sun. She’s had no schooling. She has no idea what planet earth is like. How can somebody in that situation be human other than biologically?
This book reinvented that typical science fiction question for me. I have never read anything like this. Womanhood is another huge piece of this character work. The main theme is what makes us human but also what goes into being a woman. There is also the question of what the world would be like without the patriarchy. This goes great with some of the other feminist literature that I have read in the last eight months.
With this story being set in a windowless, colorless bunker, you probably wonder how I found this beautiful. We go from there to a world that is gritty and rocky. It is all desolate and bleak. There is no civilization, it is a wasteland. I just had so many questions and had such an easy time imagining these scenes. I loved to see these women make their own society without the constraints that our world has on women.
The writing is where I very much questioned what I would rate this book. It is a stream of consciousness that isn’t for everyone and typically isn’t for me. I do highly recommend following along with the audiobook as that does break the story down in parts. Our main character is a young girl for the start of the story and has to be taught things like grammar and math. Those scenes were tedious and went in one ear and out the other. That can kind of go back to the mix of character work and plot, there are so many little things in our lives that we take for granted. Those lessons that we have learned. They have to be in detail for the narrator but for us, those are things that we already know.
I cannot say this is a character driven story or a plot driven story. It is all so interconnected. The characters are exploring this world and they are even coming to terms with what it means to be a human and what it means to be a woman. We, the readers, are not the only ones who are on this realization journey. That just shows how much you can be immersed into this story.
The intrigue was one of my favorite parts. When I would be away from the book, I was wanting to be back in its pages. I have had so much fun reading this with my book club and coming up with different theories of what the author was trying to do or what had happened to this world. Even questions of is this a human story? Are all of our characters humans or some other beings and what has happened to them. I am typically someone who does not like an open ended book. I am a logical person who likes to have answers and know why things work the way that they do. You are not going to get that here. Our characters are going through the same questions that we are. I think that is part of what makes this work for me. It is one of the points of the story.
I loved the questions and thoughts that this book presented to me. It is one that I will be thinking about for a long time. I highly recommend that you give this book a go.
5 out of 5 stars.
Izzy Reads 