12/22/2023 0 Comments A road to nowhere bookIt tells the tale of a young woman (Etta) who is so enthralled by the myth of the Unnamed Midwife that she longs to emulate her. The second book in The Road to Nowhere series is titled The Book of Etta. I get what the author is trying to do there, but it brings to mind something an editor once told me: “It’s okay for the character to be confused, but it’s never okay for the reader to be confused.” The author treats her as a man when she is pretending to be a man, which can be confusing in the beginning, and you might find yourself wondering: “He? Who is he?” but it becomes clear in short order that the “he” is the Unnamed. She distributes contraceptives as a life-saving measure. ![]() She mostly pulls it off, and she travels across the country trying to buy female slaves from wretched examples of manhood. She binds her breasts, speaks in a lower register, puts grit on her face to mimic a 5 o’clock shadow, etc. It’s also well written, interesting, and I couldn’t wait to get back to it when I was taking a break from reading.Īlmost right away, the protagonist figures out that if she wants to survive traveling across the country alone, she’d better pretend to be a man. I did like the book (with the exception of the things spelled out above), and I do recommend it. So, you might get the idea that I didn’t like and don’t recommend The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, but that isn’t true. ![]() Even the group of devout, fundamentalist Christians (LDS) eventually turned to child rape. That part of the tale was a little heavy-handed, and to be honest led to some eye-rolling moments for me. Not only do we have this world-ending virus to deal with, but evidently 99 percent of the men who survived are dirtbags and rapists. Worse yet, it didn’t go away, and woman who survived the initial infection mostly died if they got pregnant (along with the child). The plague also had another nasty effect–it killed the babies as they were being born. ![]() The book tells the post-apocalyptic tale of an unnamed, bisexual woman–a nurse–who wakes up alone in a hospital, after having survived a plague that killed most of the women in the world. It was quirky, imaginative, and, in my opinion, novel (haha! Get it?). I was lucky to be introduced to Meg Elison’s work (specifically The Book of the Unnamed Midwife) last month.
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