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Daughters of the North
Sarah Hall's Daughters of the North won the Tiptree Award, which is why I read it (also because the Wiscon Book Club selected it as this month's book). Overall, I was pretty underwhelmed with this book. Apparently, its plot (dystopian future in which women's right to have babies is limited by an Authoritarian government) is derivative of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, which I haven't yet read.
The narrator is unreliable, but I really just spent the novel hating the writing style, which is overly descriptive to me.
Descriptions of the commune of women that broke away from society read like a modern-day liberal's wet dream; lengthy descriptions of organic food and farming nearly had me rolling my eyes.
This book doesn't do anything exciting for me. The feminists of the future have kept men, make their own sustainable living, and realize it's okay to have sex with each other, too. Yawn.
I'm frankly surprised that this book beat out Brian K. Vaughan's Y: The Last Man comic book series, which was on the Tiptree Award's notable mentions list. I much prefer Y to this.
As a random question: Are Tiptree Award winners selected based solely upon the way they deal with gender? Or does the quality of the writing play into it as well?
If you're looking for a last-minute novel to read before Wiscon, read Maureen F. McHugh's China Mountain Zhang instead.
The narrator is unreliable, but I really just spent the novel hating the writing style, which is overly descriptive to me.
Descriptions of the commune of women that broke away from society read like a modern-day liberal's wet dream; lengthy descriptions of organic food and farming nearly had me rolling my eyes.
This book doesn't do anything exciting for me. The feminists of the future have kept men, make their own sustainable living, and realize it's okay to have sex with each other, too. Yawn.
I'm frankly surprised that this book beat out Brian K. Vaughan's Y: The Last Man comic book series, which was on the Tiptree Award's notable mentions list. I much prefer Y to this.
As a random question: Are Tiptree Award winners selected based solely upon the way they deal with gender? Or does the quality of the writing play into it as well?
If you're looking for a last-minute novel to read before Wiscon, read Maureen F. McHugh's China Mountain Zhang instead.
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I tell you, though, I've got a very full plate of reading to do in the next week. Daughters for book club by Thursday night, and three stories for my critique group at the Wiscon Writers' Workshop on Friday morning.
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Aww, I'm sorry the book sucked for you. Yeah, I'm not sure how excited I am about it either, as right now I never want to read another feminist utopia AGAIN. I've read SO MANY of them for my thesis and they all have this didactic quality that really has started to set my teeth on edge. Of course, part of me still loves them, otherwise I wouldn't have chosen to write about them, but I'm just oversaturated by them at this point. Sigh. I'm glad Y was on the shortlist for Tiptree, at least, I wasn't sure if they did consider graphic novels or what.
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I was intrigued by the unfamiliar vocabulary for the natural world -- it reminded me that English is the combination of many language strains. It was charming in the same way Jabberwocky is, conveying meaning through onomatopoeia and context.
More importantly, I read it as a dystopian cautionary tale. Jackie's colony was a reductio-ad-absurdam nightmare using the master's tools to dismantle the master's house. The organic food & farming was incredibly hard work, not enough to go around, brutish and short. It vividly reminded me of my sojourn among Marxist-Leninist-Maoists in the 70s. It revisited the themes in one of the poems that helped me move away from that rigid mindset, Bertold Brecht's "To Posterity"
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