creative derivative

A Gentle Tyranny by Jess Corban

Rating: 3.5 stars (out of 5)

Genre: feminist speculative fiction

Review: This book is what you would get if you combined the gender-segregated society of Sheri S. Tepper's The Gate to Women's Country with the capital extravagnce and high stakes competition of Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games.  Which is to say that this book is more than a little derivative.  Is it still worth reading?  Yes.

Corban takes the ideas behind these two books and runs with them, adding in descriptions of the jungle setting that are beyond lush.  Reina's naivete at the beginning of the book was troublesome to me, but Corban places her in situations that force her confront her own lack of knowledge and gives her the motivation to overcome it.  Reina's growth is realistic and believable in a way that many authors can't pull off.  And we learn that her ignorance isn't entirely due to her sheltered upbringing or her own passivity.  There are things in her society that are just not talked about, and which will probably turn out to be its downfall.  We'll have to wait for the sequel to find out, though.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for this review.

what's your point?

A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert
Rating: 3.5 stars (out of 5)
Genre: fiction, historical fiction
Review: I think I would have liked this book better if I'd known what the message was supposed to be. That successive generations are bound by an ancestor's acts, either to repeat it or react against it? Or the opposite, as seems to be what happens here: just because your mother/grandmother/great-grandmother/great-great-grandmother (as we move through the generations) starved herself in the name of suffrage, that has absolutely no bearing on your own tendency toward activism. As vignettes of the lives of 5 individual women, these stories are good, compellingly written, and all that. As a thesis, this book doesn't quite hold together.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for this review.

nostalgia and foreshadowing

The Wednesday Sisters by Meg Waite Clayton

Rating: 4.5 stars (out of 5)

Genre: fiction

Review: This is a book of finely drawn and distinct characters. I think it must be easy when writing a book about 5 women to have them all be similar in some ways, but the Wednesday Sisters (as they call themselves) each have their own identity. Each has their own struggles and fears and joys. Through Clayton's vivid writing, we get to share all of these as each character shares them with the group and gains strength from the sharing.

An excellent book of the power of women's friendships, this is also a story of how these women, young mothers at the end of the 1960s, each react differently to the women's liberation movement and other cultural upheavals of that time.

The story is told through the eyes of one of the women, looking back from 35 years later. Her tone is nostalgic for that era (in a very progressive way), but at the same time there is repeated foreshadowing of events to come, both in the lives of the Wednesday Sisters and in the world around them. Aside from this slightly troubling dichotomy of tone, this is an enjoyable book.

FTC Disclaimer: This book was given to me by the publisher in exchange for this review.