Mae27

How the hell did this win the Arthur C Clarke?

Revisado: 01-29-22

I would have given everything except the reader 0 stars if possible. This was a grotesquely misogynistic, trite, cloying, nauseating mess, with most of its most interesting themes and concepts are left wildly un- or under-examined. I realize some of what I dislike about it is down to the narrator being a very believably rendered teenager, but it really does come across like the audience is actually supposed to accept in the end that she’s a noble, brave, clear-eyed, morally superior hero saving the world by committing an extremely elaborate suicide via pregnancy. It also truly comes across that women in this world fall into exactly three categories: passive caretakers who contribute only problems when they try to break out of the role, shrieking harridans cruelly and unfairly blaming men for the literally murderous exploitation of teenage girls’ reproductive capacity, and heroic incubators who save the world by voluntarily entering medically induced comas to have pregnancies which are guaranteed to kill them. Other characters in the story try to talk the main character out of her suicidal plan, in part by pointing out that there are other ways to try and cure “Maternal Death Syndrome” than by asking teen girls to die in an effort to gestate new children who are immune and that as a bright young person she might contribute her intellect rather than her corpse to those efforts, but she and the narrative ultimately seem to decide those people are deluded by false hope. The only thing a woman can contribute of value in the world of this story is to have a baby and die, and she has to do it before she turns 17. It’s like Ms Rogers read The Handmaid’s Tale and thought it was too radically feminist, and tried to write a story where the Handmaids were volunteers fighting against foolish scientific prejudice and the sad, mislaid wishes of their own families in order to ~save humanity~ by literally dying to have babies. It’s just the worst. I guess since it was long-listed for the Man Booker and won the Arthur C Clarke some people must have liked it, but I sure as heck wasn’t one of them.

The woman who read the audiobook was wonderful, tho. I wish my first experience of her reading had been with a better book.

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