– I received a free copy in exchange for an honest review. –

Published by Little, Brown and Company on 25 Jul 2017
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Years ago, just before the country was incinerated to wasteland, ten men and their families colonized an island off the coast. They built a radical society of ancestor worship, controlled breeding, and the strict rationing of knowledge and history. Only the Wanderers–chosen male descendants of the original ten–are allowed to cross to the wastelands, where they scavenge for detritus among the still-smoldering fires.

The daughters of these men are wives-in-training. At the first sign of puberty, they face their Summer of Fruition, a ritualistic season that drags them from adolescence to matrimony. They have children, who have children, and when they are no longer useful, they take their final draught and die. But in the summer, the younger children reign supreme. With the adults indoors and the pubescent in Fruition, the children live wildly–they fight over food and shelter, free of their fathers’ hands and their mothers’ despair. And it is at the end of one summer that little Caitlin Jacob sees something so horrifying, so contradictory to the laws of the island, that she must share it with the others.

Born leader Janey Solomon steps up to seek the truth. At seventeen years old, Janey is so unwilling to become a woman, she is slowly starving herself to death. Trying urgently now to unravel the mysteries of the island and what lies beyond, before her own demise, she attempts to lead an uprising of the girls that may be their undoing.

I chose this book because…

I’ve been reading a lot of realistic fiction, but I haven’t been reading very much of other fictions (by realistic fiction, I don’t mean the genre, but fictions that are realistic-ish, including the hoards of thrillers and sci-fi that I’ve been reading). So, I’m interested in being taken to a different world, as nightmarish as this world seems to be for girls and women; thankfully it’s just a book! But I’m also interested in drawing parallels to how women are treated in this fictional world and how women are treated in the modern world right now.

Upon reading it…

I felt so deeply for the girls. It was a truly terrible world for girls and women. I wanted them to realise it instead of getting brainwashed by the patriarchy. And once they did, I wanted them to escape to a better life or stage a revolution and change their society. As a reader, of course I recognised all the injustice, which not all the characters in the book could right away, but I could also relate to this. When all of society is telling you one thing, you start to believe that your own feelings are not valid, that you yourself are not valid. Whilst women in the modern world are certainly not treated as badly as they are in this fictional world, there’s still a lot in the modern world that women need to fight for. Especially as a woman of colour, realising that you and your feelings are valid is so important.

I imagine that this book takes place post-apocalyptic, the world as we know it has become what is called the “wastelands,” and there survives a small civilization on an island, on which it seems like society has reverted back to its old ways where women are just objects owned by men and their sole purpose is to make babies. But also… maybe not?

All we know for sure is what the girls and women know about the island, and all we know about the wastelands is what the wanderers tell them. For all I know, the rest of the world was in perfect condition and the wastelands were just a ruse to keep the girls and women in check. A big part of what drove me through the book was the suspense of wondering what the wastelands were, right along with the girls in the book who were trying to figure out that same thing, except those girls didn’t even know anything about the pre-apocalyptic world—the island was their only reality. This book kept me hooked like a mystery novel!

★★★★☆

Because they can’t stop us from thinking. They can force us to do anything they want, but they can’t stop us from thinking.

She discovers that grief is a liquid. It passes thickly down her throat as she drinks water and pools soggily around her food. It flows through her veins, dark and heavy, and fills the cavities of her bones until they weigh so much she can barely lift her head. It coats her skin like a slick of fat, moving and swirling over her eyes, turning their clear surfaces to dull gray. At night, it rises up from the floor silently until she feels it seep into the bedclothes, lick at her heels and elbows and throat, thrust upward like a rising tide that will drown her in sorrow.