Honestly, I was surprised by how quiet and peaceful this novel felt to me. I think all the marketing around “women trapped in cages” and the dystopian label had led to believe this was something different, more violent perhaps.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a sad and disturbing tale with its fair share of trauma, but it’s also weirdly peaceful (largely no men, perhaps?!). I thought it told an interesting tale about survival and community, as well as intimacy. What happens when normal human bonds and conventions are broken? What conventions make us who we are?
I don’t think you need to know too much about the premise, I’m not sure it’s helpful, but it’s a post-apocalyptical narrative that focuses on a young woman surviving with 39 other women. It’s honestly quite uneventful for a lot of the time, and you exist in the head of our clearheaded captivity heroine.
Reminiscent of survival stories like Jack London and other wilderness survival books I hoovered up in my childhood, this book does somehow feel embedded in its 1995 context??
This book will annoy you if you need definitives, answers, coherence, and plausibility. Luckily, I don’t need any of those and just enjoyed the meandering philosophy of a girl out to understand the world.
I called one of my Finnish girlfriends to talk about this book and something she said about the narrator stuck with me: she just accepted things as they were. Parts of her were missing, but what was left was clearheaded, sharp, and charismatic. Without knowing men, or society, she could unsubscribe from certain fears and emotions.
One word: barren.
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