Review: Three Dystopian Visions for Women
I recently picked up three books that had been sitting in my TBR list for about a year. (They were in the 2018 reading list that I posted in January.) They share similarities in theme, yet the stories and characters are very different. They’re all pre- or post-apocalyptic visions of a future that I think of as female dystopian horror (or horrific speculation, per Margaret Atwood).
These aren’t stories written for women only, but stories focused on issues related to gender rights and roles in society. These books were really short, compared to the Throne of Glass books I’d been reading for months, and I had sufficiently recovered from the overdose of apocalyptic dystopian sci-fi I suffered back in the summer by bingeing The Handmaid’s Tale, Man in the High Castle, and Colony back to back, so I decided to read them all in one week and compare them.
Though none of these got 5 stars from me, each offered a provocative glimpse into a future I’m glad I’m not living and an interesting exploration of what-ifs I’d never thought to ask. And all the authors are excellent at crafting prose. So without further ado, here are my nonspoilery reviews.
The Power
The premise of this book intrigued me when I saw it on President Obama’s list of favorite books of 2017.
Young women are developing a new bodily organ, called a skein, which creates and stores a powerful electrical charge that they can shoot out of their fingertips — to kill people, to set things on fire, to force men to do their bidding. Young females can “pass the flame” to older females by showing them how to access their dormant power.
This new power emboldens women. Cultural power dynamics shift. Men are no longer the dominant gender. Predictably, people react in vastly different ways.
The story is told from the POV of several different characters over irregular intervals of time. This was hard to follow at first, but after a while they differentiated themselves, and I was able to remember their stories easily after the time jumps. The book begins 10 years before some as-yet-unknown cataclysmic event is going to occur (from the perspective of the omnipotent author, it’s counting down to an event that has already happened). Women are just starting to manifest this new power; they’re confused, afraid, and trying to come to grips with it. We get the story from a male journalist who reports on protests and political events all over the world, an abused runaway who seeks refuge in religion, a gangster’s daughter with ties to an international business empire, and a middle-aged female politician who must hide her power to keep her job. I never liked any of these characters much, but they provide unique and valuable perspectives. We check back to see what has happened with them and the rest of the world every so often, as the unspecified big event looms ever closer and affects them with greater urgency.
I wasn’t happy about the way the story ended, because I was hoping for a different resolution. Perhaps the one that the author chose is more literary or likely, but these days I’m usually trying to escape real-life political “alternative realities” when I read, so I get to hope for something better. Still, it was a compelling exploration of gender and power dynamics, and one of these days maybe people will learn to handle their differences in a more rational and dignified manner. The author took some risks in the way she told the story, with mixed results, and I give her a lot of credit for it. The little twist at the end was pretty brilliant.
Future Home of the Living God
This story is narrated by Cedar Hawk Songmaker, a pregnant, 26-year-old woman with Native American ancestry who is writing a diary for her unborn baby to read in the future. She was adopted and raised by white, liberal parents from Minnesota. Now that she’s pregnant, she wonders about her genetic medical history and goes looking for her Native American biological mother. She finds her living on a tribal reservation and heads right over for a visit.
Unfortunately, Cedar lives in a world where all life seems to be devolving at an alarming rate. Existing life forms can’t reproduce, new generations can’t develop properly. There are rumors about what happens to women who do get pregnant, and to their babies. Laws become increasingly restrictive; soon pregnant women are kidnapped off the streets and imprisoned in birthing centers, never to be seen again, and neighbors turn in neighbors for reward money.
I enjoyed the main character and her story. I empathized with her plight, but never bonded with her deeply. What stood out most for me in this story was the portrayal of Native American culture. Cedar’s biological mother was eager to welcome her into their family — I really enjoyed Cedar’s bonding with her new family members and discovering her heritage. I loved watching her mature into her new maternal role. But once society started running off the rails and hunting down pregnant women, it reminded me an awful lot of The Handmaid’s Tale.
Again, the ending was kind of a letdown. I hoped for something more uplifting, while I simultaneously feared total tragedy, but it ultimately settled for something kind of meh. It was a realistic ending, though, and left the potential for me to imagine a future for the characters that doesn’t completely suck.
The Book of Joan
After my brief bout of squeamishness at the circumstances in which humanity found itself, this book grabbed my complete attention much faster than the other two. I started highlighting lots of quotes right away.
A few thousand survivors of humankind hover above Earth in a container complex kludged together from leftover space station and satellite parts. Geocatastrophies triggered by a dying sun have left Earth brown, barren, and choking in toxins. People have devolved into generic looking bald, waxy white, sexless entities, ruled by an evil populist authoritarian, who are killed in a celebratory public ceremony when they turn 50 (made me think of Logan’s Run.)
People have lost the ability to feel natural sensory stimuli. They mutilate their bodies with layers of skin grafts that tell story upon story, distorting their natural bodies into garish shapes. They use these grafts to attain prestige, and to keep their memories and others’ at hand. The narrator, an accomplished skin graft artist turning 49, is finalizing her great masterpiece — using her body to tell the life story of Joan of Dirt, a young heroine and martyr based on our Joan of Ark.
At this point, I’d had entirely enough of the over-the-top bodymutilations art. I realized that all these survivors were wealthy, bored, and frittering their lives away with stupid past times, carving old stories instead of living new ones. They probably weren’t going to be the heroes of this story.
Then the POV switched to Joan’s and the book completely lost me. There was a lot of mumbo jumbo that I couldn’t follow. When the rich people had escaped, they left everyone else behind to suffer and die on Earth, and that’s where Joan was. Aside from obvious commentary on wealth inequality, I think there were interesting explorations of art and personal identity. What makes us human. Gender identity. And characters called engenderines, who were “closer to matter and elements than to human”. It was fascinating that the same character who set the world on its path to destruction could also save it.
I suspect Real Life is just too complicated right now for me to have enough energy left over to decipher this story, and maybe when things calm down I’ll reread the second half. I’ve heard good things about the author’s other books, and her prose kept me reading all the way to the end, so I don’t plan to give up on her. In all fairness, a lot of reviewers thought this book was deeply profound and a lot felt like me — readers seem to totally get it or not at all. So until I get it, I need a new lip rating.
If I’m unhappy with every ending, I’m realizing that maybe the problem is me. So I’ve begun to examine my expectations. After all, there are Wench-recommended romances in my TBR list if I’m hankering for HEA. In the meantime, as soon as I finished these, a friend recommended a new post-apocalyptic book published in August, so of course I picked it right up. How did I like it? Well, that’s a review for another day!
Have you read any good dystopian fiction lately, Saucy Readers? If you have, we hope you’ll share your recommendations with us!
These aren’t stories written for women only, but stories focused on issues related to gender rights and roles in society. These books were really short, compared to the Throne of Glass books I’d been reading for months, and I had sufficiently recovered from the overdose of apocalyptic dystopian sci-fi I suffered back in the summer by bingeing The Handmaid’s Tale, Man in the High Castle, and Colony back to back, so I decided to read them all in one week and compare them.
Though none of these got 5 stars from me, each offered a provocative glimpse into a future I’m glad I’m not living and an interesting exploration of what-ifs I’d never thought to ask. And all the authors are excellent at crafting prose. So without further ado, here are my nonspoilery reviews.
The Power
Young women are developing a new bodily organ, called a skein, which creates and stores a powerful electrical charge that they can shoot out of their fingertips — to kill people, to set things on fire, to force men to do their bidding. Young females can “pass the flame” to older females by showing them how to access their dormant power.
This new power emboldens women. Cultural power dynamics shift. Men are no longer the dominant gender. Predictably, people react in vastly different ways.
The story is told from the POV of several different characters over irregular intervals of time. This was hard to follow at first, but after a while they differentiated themselves, and I was able to remember their stories easily after the time jumps. The book begins 10 years before some as-yet-unknown cataclysmic event is going to occur (from the perspective of the omnipotent author, it’s counting down to an event that has already happened). Women are just starting to manifest this new power; they’re confused, afraid, and trying to come to grips with it. We get the story from a male journalist who reports on protests and political events all over the world, an abused runaway who seeks refuge in religion, a gangster’s daughter with ties to an international business empire, and a middle-aged female politician who must hide her power to keep her job. I never liked any of these characters much, but they provide unique and valuable perspectives. We check back to see what has happened with them and the rest of the world every so often, as the unspecified big event looms ever closer and affects them with greater urgency.
I wasn’t happy about the way the story ended, because I was hoping for a different resolution. Perhaps the one that the author chose is more literary or likely, but these days I’m usually trying to escape real-life political “alternative realities” when I read, so I get to hope for something better. Still, it was a compelling exploration of gender and power dynamics, and one of these days maybe people will learn to handle their differences in a more rational and dignified manner. The author took some risks in the way she told the story, with mixed results, and I give her a lot of credit for it. The little twist at the end was pretty brilliant.
Future Home of the Living God
Unfortunately, Cedar lives in a world where all life seems to be devolving at an alarming rate. Existing life forms can’t reproduce, new generations can’t develop properly. There are rumors about what happens to women who do get pregnant, and to their babies. Laws become increasingly restrictive; soon pregnant women are kidnapped off the streets and imprisoned in birthing centers, never to be seen again, and neighbors turn in neighbors for reward money.
I enjoyed the main character and her story. I empathized with her plight, but never bonded with her deeply. What stood out most for me in this story was the portrayal of Native American culture. Cedar’s biological mother was eager to welcome her into their family — I really enjoyed Cedar’s bonding with her new family members and discovering her heritage. I loved watching her mature into her new maternal role. But once society started running off the rails and hunting down pregnant women, it reminded me an awful lot of The Handmaid’s Tale.
Again, the ending was kind of a letdown. I hoped for something more uplifting, while I simultaneously feared total tragedy, but it ultimately settled for something kind of meh. It was a realistic ending, though, and left the potential for me to imagine a future for the characters that doesn’t completely suck.
The Book of Joan
A few thousand survivors of humankind hover above Earth in a container complex kludged together from leftover space station and satellite parts. Geocatastrophies triggered by a dying sun have left Earth brown, barren, and choking in toxins. People have devolved into generic looking bald, waxy white, sexless entities, ruled by an evil populist authoritarian, who are killed in a celebratory public ceremony when they turn 50 (made me think of Logan’s Run.)
People have lost the ability to feel natural sensory stimuli. They mutilate their bodies with layers of skin grafts that tell story upon story, distorting their natural bodies into garish shapes. They use these grafts to attain prestige, and to keep their memories and others’ at hand. The narrator, an accomplished skin graft artist turning 49, is finalizing her great masterpiece — using her body to tell the life story of Joan of Dirt, a young heroine and martyr based on our Joan of Ark.
At this point, I’d had entirely enough of the over-the-top body
Then the POV switched to Joan’s and the book completely lost me. There was a lot of mumbo jumbo that I couldn’t follow. When the rich people had escaped, they left everyone else behind to suffer and die on Earth, and that’s where Joan was. Aside from obvious commentary on wealth inequality, I think there were interesting explorations of art and personal identity. What makes us human. Gender identity. And characters called engenderines, who were “closer to matter and elements than to human”. It was fascinating that the same character who set the world on its path to destruction could also save it.
I suspect Real Life is just too complicated right now for me to have enough energy left over to decipher this story, and maybe when things calm down I’ll reread the second half. I’ve heard good things about the author’s other books, and her prose kept me reading all the way to the end, so I don’t plan to give up on her. In all fairness, a lot of reviewers thought this book was deeply profound and a lot felt like me — readers seem to totally get it or not at all. So until I get it, I need a new lip rating.
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| I’m not sure what I just read Source |
If I’m unhappy with every ending, I’m realizing that maybe the problem is me. So I’ve begun to examine my expectations. After all, there are Wench-recommended romances in my TBR list if I’m hankering for HEA. In the meantime, as soon as I finished these, a friend recommended a new post-apocalyptic book published in August, so of course I picked it right up. How did I like it? Well, that’s a review for another day!
Have you read any good dystopian fiction lately, Saucy Readers? If you have, we hope you’ll share your recommendations with us!
Great review! I loved The Passage trilogy...dystopian and there are vampires :)
ReplyDeleteThank you! And thank you for reminding me about The Passage. I liked the first two books a lot and still need to read the third one.
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