Tag: dystopia

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The Violence

Title: The Violence

Author: Delilah S. Dawson

Genre: horror dystopian

Thank you, NetGalley, for this book.

Dystopia is my favorite book genre. I’ve burned through the classics, so I’m excited whenever a new one comes out. And the fact that this one is also horror makes for the perfect combination. What I loved most about this book was that it was not only a great plot but an excellent study of human nature.

From Goodreads: When Chelsea Martin kisses her husband hello at the door of their perfect home, a chilled bottle of beer in hand and dinner on the table, she may look like the ideal wife, mother, and homemaker—but in fact she’s following an unwritten rulebook, carefully navigating David’s stormy moods in a desperate nightly bid to avoid catastrophe. If family time doesn’t go exactly how David wants, bad things happen—to Chelsea and the couple’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Ella. Cut off from all support, controlled and manipulated for years, Chelsea has no resources and no one to turn to. Her wealthy, narcissistic mother, Patricia, would rather focus on the dust on her chandelier than acknowledge Chelsea’s bruises. After all, Patricia’s life looks perfect on the surface, too.

But the façade crumbles when a mysterious condition overtakes the nation. Known as the Violence, it causes the infected to experience sudden, explosive bursts of animalistic rage and attack anyone in their path. The ensuing chaos brings opportunity for Chelsea—and inspires a plan to liberate herself and her family once and for all.

This synopsis is just the beginning. So much more unfolds after this point. As you peel back the layers of trauma Chelsea and Patricia suffered at the hands of men, you realize why they act the way they do. And they are excellent dynamic characters who barely resemble their earlier selves. This isn’t an “all men are bad” book, either. As the story progresses, we meet some incredible men and non-binary characters who support these extraordinary ladies. I really loved this book, not just because of the dystopian/horror aspect, but because these characters will stay with me for a long time.

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The Ferryman

Title: The Ferryman

Author: Justin Cronin

Genre: dystopia, science fiction

Thank you, NetGalley, for this book.

I LOVE Cronin’s Passage trilogy. It’s one I want to revisit every few years. I’m such a fan that I’ll read anything he publishes. When NetGalley offered this one to me, I jumped on it immediately. Not only do I love the author, but it’s also dystopian, which is my favorite genre. And I can easily say this is one of the best books I’ve read this year. I was hooked and never saw all the twists this book takes.

From Goodreads: Founded by the mysterious genius known as the Designer, the archipelago of Prospera lies hidden from the horrors of a deteriorating outside world. In this island paradise, Prospera’s lucky citizens enjoy long, fulfilling lives until the monitors embedded in their forearms, meant to measure their physical health and psychological well-being, fall below 10 percent. Then they retire themselves, embarking on a ferry ride to the island known as the Nursery, where their failing bodies are renewed, their memories are wiped clean, and they are readied to restart life afresh.

Proctor Bennett, of the Department of Social Contracts, has a satisfying career as a ferryman, gently shepherding people through the retirement process–and, when necessary, enforcing it. But all is not well with Proctor. For one thing, he’s been dreaming–which is supposed to be impossible in Prospera. For another, his monitor percentage has begun to drop alarmingly fast. And then comes the day he is summoned to retire his own father, who gives him a disturbing and cryptic message before being wrestled onto the ferry.

Meanwhile, something is stirring. The Support Staff, ordinary men and women who provide the labor to keep Prospera running, have begun to question their place in the social order. Unrest is building, and there are rumors spreading of a resistance group–known as “Arrivalists”–who may be fomenting revolution.

Soon Proctor finds himself questioning everything he once believed, entangled with a much bigger cause than he realized–and on a desperate mission to uncover the truth. 

This book just kept me guessing as to what was going to happen next. When I was convinced I knew where the book was headed, I realized I was only halfway done. The plot pulls the reader in so many different directions that you are also solving the mystery of just what is going on along with the characters. I’ve read more dystopian books than any other genre, and this one is definitely one of the more unique ones. It’s a mix of 1984, The Giver, and The Truman Show (along with others that I won’t disclose because of spoilers). I loved that the story is told in both first and third-person narrators. Proctor is first person, but the other characters are third, which leaves them in a bit of a mystery. I never expected a shift like this to work, but it was great, and I had no trouble following it. The worst thing about this book is that it’s not out until May, so I can’t make all my friends read it now. I absolutely loved this one.

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At the End of Everything

Title: At the End of Everything

Author: Marieke Nijkamp

Genre: YA dystopia

Thank you NetGalley for this book!

I read This Is Where It Ends a while ago and was just floored at how excellent it was. After all this time, the story has really stuck with me. So, when I saw a new book by Nijkamp, I knew I would be reading it. I’m so happy I got this one from NetGalley because it was another great one that I won’t forget anytime soon.

From Goodreads: The Hope Juvenile Treatment Center is ironically named. No one has hope for the delinquent teenagers who have been exiled there; the world barely acknowledges that they exist.

Then the guards at Hope start acting strange. And one day…they don’t show up. But when the teens band together to make a break from the facility, they encounter soldiers outside the gates. There’s a rapidly spreading infectious disease outside, and no one can leave their houses or travel without a permit. Which means that they’re stuck at Hope. And this time, no one is watching out for them at all.

As supplies quickly dwindle and a deadly plague tears through their ranks, the group has to decide whom among them they can trust and figure out how they can survive in a world that has never wanted them in the first place. 

The story is told from various teens within the Hope center. You see their survival story from multiple sides, namely those who are trying to help and make their situation as livable as possible. Even though the teens are there because they were in some kind of trouble, thankfully this isn’t some kind of Lord of the Flies re-creation. Sure, they disagree at times, but it isn’t a battle for king of the hill, and they *mostly* work together. Clearly, this was written post-Covid because plenty of the “news” the kids hear is directly from what we have been going through. Overall, I really liked this book, and I’ll keep my eye on other books from Nijkamp.

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Red Clocks

Title: Red Clocks

Author: Leni Zumas

Genre: dystopian

Finally, not a celebrity memoir! And this one was from my favorite genre- dystopia. And although I’ve read better ones, this one was really interesting. You follow five different women who all live in the same town in Oregon. They all live in a world where abortion is illegal, and the Personhood Amendment rules the land. Sound familiar?? Ugh. These women are tangentially related, which becomes more prevalent as the book progresses.

From Goodreads: Five women. One question. What is a woman for?

In this ferociously imaginative novel, abortion is once again illegal in America, in-vitro fertilization is banned, and the Personhood Amendment grants rights of life, liberty, and property to every embryo. In a small Oregon fishing town, five very different women navigate these new barriers alongside age-old questions surrounding motherhood, identity, and freedom.

Ro, a single high-school teacher, is trying to have a baby on her own, while also writing a biography of Eivør, a little-known 19th-century female polar explorer. Susan is a frustrated mother of two, trapped in a crumbling marriage. Mattie is the adopted daughter of doting parents and one of Ro’s best students, who finds herself pregnant with nowhere to turn. And Gin is the gifted, forest-dwelling homeopath, or “mender,” who brings all their fates together when she’s arrested and put on trial in a frenzied modern-day witch hunt.

I’m not sure how this book would be on audio because it has a stream-of-consciousness feel to it. The characters insert random internal thoughts into their conversations, which is easy to follow since they are italicized but in audio would be a nightmare. I really enjoyed this book, though. I loved seeing how the women all came together and helped each other out. The world they live in is terrifying but very real. There is no reason to think we aren’t headed on that same path.

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The Book of Flora

Title: The Book of Flora

Author: Meg Elison

Genre: dystopian

The Book of Flora is a direct sequel to The Book of Etta, which was a “100 years later” sequel to The Book of the Unnamed Midwife. All three of these books are fantastic. I’ve read so much dystopia, that’s it’s hard to find one that I haven’t read that’s also worth reading. Before I finished Unnamed, I had the other two on hold at my library. You can definitely just read the first without continuing, but I was really excited to see how lives had changed in the 100 years since the book ended. And in Etta’s story, we meet the characters that continue on through Flora’s story. Flora takes place immediately after Etta ends.

From Goodreads: In the wake of the apocalypse, Flora has come of age in a highly gendered post-plague society where females have become a precious, coveted, hunted, and endangered commodity. But Flora does not participate in the economy that trades in bodies. An anathema in a world that prizes procreation above all else, she is an outsider everywhere she goes, including the thriving all-female city of Shy.

Now navigating a blighted landscape, Flora, her friends, and a sullen young slave she adopts as her own child leave their oppressive pasts behind to find their place in the world. They seek refuge aboard a ship where gender is fluid, where the dynamic is uneasy, and where rumors flow of a bold new reproductive strategy.

When the promise of a miraculous hope for humanity’s future tears Flora’s makeshift family asunder, she must choose: protect the safe haven she’s built or risk everything to defy oppression, whatever its provenance.

I mentioned in my review of Etta that women were either Mothers or Midwifes. There is no other choice, but Etta made one for herself. Flora’s story lets us see even further into the gender-fluid world she lives in. Women live as men, men live as women, men are castrated and raised as women, and now it seems as though, overnight, women can turn into men during puberty. I loved this storyline exploration. Really the book is simply about Flora traveling around the country and meeting different kinds of people and seeing how they live. But the underlying plot is one of self-discovery, what it means to be a man, woman, both, or neither in the ever-evolving world.

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The Book of Etta

Title: The Book of Etta

Author: Meg Elison

Genre: dystopian

The sequel to The Book of the Unnamed Midwife takes place 100 years after Unnamed, so there aren’t going to be a lot of spoilers for the first book. Just a reminder of the plot though: a fever strikes the world, mostly attacking women and children. The Unnamed Midwife keeps a diary of her travels through the country, living as a man to survive. Okay, so Etta is a raider, and like the UM, she travels as a man she calls Eddy. As Eddy, she feels much more like herself, which confuses her, and is very discouraged by others. As a woman, she is a gift to the world and is expected to be either a midwife or a mother. Etta/Eddy has no desire to be either.

From Goodreads: Etta comes from Nowhere, a village of survivors of the great plague that wiped away the world that was. In the world that is, women are scarce and childbearing is dangerous…yet desperately necessary for humankind’s future. Mothers and midwives are sacred, but Etta has a different calling. As a scavenger. Loyal to the village but living on her own terms, Etta roams the desolate territory beyond: salvaging useful relics of the ruined past and braving the threat of brutal slave traders, who are seeking women and girls to sell and subjugate.

I’m leaving off the end of the blurb because it’s a giant spoiler, which was a huge bummer to me. As Eddy roams the world, freeing women from slavers, she also trades with other cities and learns from them. I loved how Elison handled the switch between Etta and Eddy, who each have their own pronouns, sometimes going back and forth between them within the same sentence or paragraph. But that’s how Etta/Eddy feels. Very much like two people at once. I was glad to revisit the world that the Unnamed left us and see how things changed in the past century (hint: all is not perfect). I have one more book in this series, The Book of Flora, which I’m really curious about. Flora was a character in Etta, assuming it’s the same person. So I’m curious to see where Flora’s story picks up. Overall, these seem to be hidden gems of the dystopian world, but I’m really enjoying them and definitely recommend them to others.

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The Book of the Unnamed Midwife

Title: The Book of the Unnamed Midwife

Author: Meg Elison

Genre: dystopian

Finding a dystopian novel I haven’t read is a challenge. So, when I stumble upon one, I’m delighted. Even better, finding a one that’s well-written and interesting is a needle in a haystack. And I’m so happy to report that this one was fantastic. I enjoyed it so much that I already requested the next books in the series from my library before I had even finished this one.

From Goodreads: In the wake of a fever that decimated the earth’s population—killing women and children and making childbirth deadly for the mother and infant—the midwife must pick her way through the bones of the world she once knew to find her place in this dangerous new one. Gone are the pillars of civilization. All that remains is power—and the strong who possess it.

A few women like her survived, though they are scarce. Even fewer are safe from the clans of men, who, driven by fear, seek to control those remaining. To preserve her freedom, she dons men’s clothing, goes by false names, and avoids as many people as possible. But as the world continues to grapple with its terrible circumstances, she’ll discover a role greater than chasing a pale imitation of independence. After all, if humanity is to be reborn, someone must be its guide.

We never learn the midwife’s name, but I’ll call her Jane, as she is referred to for part of the book. Mostly men survived, but a handful of women did as well. But, men being men, they rape and enslave many of the women. As Jane navigates the world as a man, she has to learn to trust people at times. She spends a chunk of the book with another woman who happens to be pregnant. A lot of women die in childbirth, and if they live, their babies always die. Survival isn’t impossible. There are so few people that supplies aren’t hard to come by, but simply surviving other humans is the hardest part. Jane was a great, strong character who made solid decisions, given her circumstances. I really thought this book was great and can’t wait to dig into the next one.

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Zone One

Title: Zone One

Author: Colson Whitehead

Genre: dystopian zombie fiction

PopSugar Reading Challenge prompt: an Afrofuturist book

My first introduction to Whitehead was through The Underground Railroad which was great. Then I read The Nickel Boys and was blown away. It was the best book I read in 2020. When I heard that he also wrote a dystopian book, which is my favorite genre, I knew I had to investigate. Bummer that I just didn’t love this one.

From Goodreads: In this wry take on the post-apocalyptic horror novel, a pandemic has devastated the planet. The plague has sorted humanity into two types: the uninfected and the infected, the living and the living dead.

Now the plague is receding, and Americans are busy rebuild­ing civilization under orders from the provisional govern­ment based in Buffalo. Their top mission: the resettlement of Manhattan. Armed forces have successfully reclaimed the island south of Canal Street—aka Zone One—but pockets of plague-ridden squatters remain. While the army has eliminated the most dangerous of the infected, teams of civilian volunteers are tasked with clearing out a more innocuous variety—the “malfunctioning” stragglers, who exist in a catatonic state, transfixed by their former lives.

Mark Spitz is a member of one of the civilian teams work­ing in lower Manhattan. Alternating between flashbacks of Spitz’s desperate fight for survival during the worst of the outbreak and his present narrative, the novel unfolds over three surreal days, as it depicts the mundane mission of straggler removal, the rigors of Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder, and the impossible job of coming to grips with the fallen world. And then things start to go wrong. Both spine chilling and playfully cerebral, Zone One bril­liantly subverts the genre’s conventions and deconstructs the zombie myth for the twenty-first century.

Admission: I listened to this book, which isn’t my preferred choice. That said, I have listened to plenty others and loved them, so I don’t think that was why I never connected. The story goes back and forth in time, which was a bit confusing. You follow Mark Spitz in those three days of his job, but you also learn about how the outbreak started, what people were doing on the “Last Night” and how Spitz got to this job to begin with. I was engaged in the story, but I guess I was expecting it to be more. More emotional, more powerful….something. But it was a good story, which I’ll take any day.

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Vox

Title: Vox

Author: Christina Dalcher

Genre: Dystopian

PopSugar Reading Challenge Prompt: a book where the main character works at your current or dream job (current job… stay-at-home mom)

I appreciate what this book tried to do. Published in 2018 during the previous administration, the plot is about men taking over and censoring women. Literal censoring. Women are allowed 100 words a day. They wear counters that keep track and any over 100 a shock will be administered. The more over 100, the worse the shock. The main character, Jean, unwillingly abides. When she is given the opportunity to remove the counter in exchange for helping the president, she jumps at the chance.

From Goodreads: Set in an America where half the population has been silenced, VOX is the harrowing, unforgettable story of what one woman will do to protect herself and her daughter.

On the day the government decrees that women are no longer allowed to speak more than 100 words daily, Dr. Jean McClellan is in denial—this can’t happen here. Not in America. Not to her. This is just the beginning.

Soon women can no longer hold jobs. Girls are no longer taught to read or write. Females no longer have a voice. Before, the average person spoke sixteen thousand words a day, but now women only have one hundred to make themselves heard. But this is not the end.

For herself, her daughter, and every woman silenced, Jean will reclaim her voice.

This book’s premise is important and, thankfully, no longer an issue since we have a new administration, but it didn’t work at all. The characters are great, the concept is great, but the writing was subpar. I lost track of how many times the plot went from A to C without explaining B. I’m a smart gal, I can make inferences, but this book was just so full of holes. Not plot holes necessarily, but just holes in explanation. A good editor could have eliminated those. As much as I wanted to like this book, it just frustrated me more. Bummer.

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The Handmaid’s Tale

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I first read this one ages ago. Maybe over ten years. After I read 1984, I devoured dystopian books. I still do, but I’m starting to run out of options. I definitely have burned through the classics in this genre. Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, A Clockwork Orange, The Giver, We, Anthem, and Animal Farm all come to mind. And I remember being just baffled by this book. I loved it, but it was so horrifying that I could hardly wrap my brain around it. I wanted to revisit this before I read The Testaments, and thankfully, this passes the Bechdel test, so I’m using it for the Popsugar Reading Challenge.

The story follows an unnamed woman, but we know her as Offred. Meaning she’s “of Fred,” essentially she belongs to this man, Fred. She’s a Handmaid, specially selected to birth his children. Most women are barred, so Handmaids are very important to the society of Gilead (formerly somewhere in the US, probably in New England). Offred is expected to participate in a Ceremony where both Fred and his wife are present, but Offred is raped. She is a Handmaid to live. She doesn’t like this role. She doesn’t have a choice, though. She has a husband and daughter but is unsure of their whereabouts or even if they are alive. Margaret Atwood wrote this back in the early 80s (published in 1985), and it’s really shocking how prescient she was. Of course, we aren’t close to living in a world like Gilead, but there are eerie hints, for sure.

Then Hulu produced the amazing series, and I got sucked back into Offred’s world. The first season is much like this book. I couldn’t think about Offred without imagining the brilliant Elisabeth Moss. Of course, a few changes were made, and a few characters were more developed in the book, but the season is a really well-done, faithful adaptation of the book. I’m curious to see what The Testaments brings, once it finally gets to me on library loan.