Reviews with content warning for Gore - I Who Have Never Known Men

Reviews tagging 'Gore'

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman

18 reviews

chloe_jade's review

dark mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.75

This book will haunt me forever - and I’m glad. Such elegantly written prose for such an evocative tale.

I was saddened to see people find this book misogynistic. The author, Jacqueline, was born in 1929 - I believe the characters are a good reflection of what she would’ve lived through - patriarchal beauty standards, housewife culture, patronisation of women. It’s not right to assume any author’s beliefs are the same as their characters.

The characters are a product of all of that, and I found the protagonist’s dedication to exploration despite the solitude to be empowering. By the end, I had a strong affinity with the protagonist.

A raw dive into what it means to be human when everything is stripped away from us.

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laurakfinnegan's review

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dark mysterious sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated

5.0

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_meganrose's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional mysterious sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes

4.0

This is unlike anything I have ever read. Dark. Mysterious. Chilling. Tragic. I am normally not the biggest fan of dystopian novels, but I really enjoyed this read. Only complaint is the chapters are sooooo long. Wish it would have been divided up a bit more into shorter chapters with all of the same content.

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edamamebean's review

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challenging dark emotional hopeful reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

Wow. What a strange and compelling book. And so vaguely spooky too. This is a speculative fiction/sci-fi about a young woman who grows up as a captive in a bunker with thirty-nine other women. Her story begins with her coming-of-age, but really picks up when she and the other women finally escape the bunker in search of answers to why they’ve been held captive for so many years. They never do find answers. In fact, every new discovery just brings up more questions. But the book isn’t about the rules of their world. It’s more of a think-piece, interested in asking existential questions. What do things like death, time, or love mean for someone who doesn’t experience a normal human existence? What happens to a person if there’s no one left to remember them? What does womanhood mean to a woman who has never known men? I’ll be thinking about this one for a long time.

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hk255's review against another edition

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adventurous dark mysterious reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

I really enjoyed this book! It's unique and fits in with exactly what I like in a book.

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peachybee53's review

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challenging dark mysterious tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

I Who Have Never Known Men has thrown me into an existential spiral. It is intimate, brazenly honest, relatable in its raw humanness but also extremely eerie. I enjoyed the stream-of-consciousness style which reads like a personal diary. I found it quite painful to keep going at times, but understand that that was a part of the storytelling itself.

Our protagonist is forced to discover something, anything, which she can have control over, and thus finds herself navigating a new world of internal possibility, ideas and change. There is a disconnect between her and those around her, the outside world, her own body and mind. There are feelings of isolation, fury, confusion, and a subtle but persistent sense of survival, hope & curiosity. The acts of thought, imagination, communication & education become quiet & stubborn forms of rebellion, finding sense where there is none.

The overall feeling of this book is one of somber monotony, such as an endless void or electrical static. And yet, I am changed by having read it.

"She lost her mind in the cerebral convolutions, the mysterious nooks and crannies of the memory, she had gone backwards, seeking a world that made sense, losing her way among the labyrinths, slowly deteriorating, dimming, noiselessly being obliterated and then fading away so gradually that it was impossible to pinpoint the transition between the flickering little flame and the shadows."

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liesthemoontells's review

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adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective relaxing sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

This was a beautiful, haunting, moving book. I had put off reading it as the themes sounded incredibly heavy, but after a friend's recommendation and assurance that it was more of a reflective read I decided to tackle it.

While the book's themes are complex, heavy, and at times very dark, Harpman's treatment of the subject matter is more meditative and philosophical than shock provoking. There are many ruminations on what it means to be human, on navigating love, gender, and human connection when you have been given no reference point.

I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone who needs resolutions to their mystery fiction but if you are looking for a powerful and ambivalent piece of speculative literature I could not recommend it more.

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