Reviews

Thoughtful and compelling feminist science fiction which probably speaks more strongly to us today than at the time of its publication. Her Haden Elgin's writing on the reproductive and economic exploitation of women to fuel endless economic and colonial expansion is as relevant to feminist economics as her linguistic writing is to the philosophy of the generative possibilities of language.

eliz89062's review

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adventurous informative inspiring tense medium-paced

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

4.5

lyrasbookshelf's review against another edition

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emotional hopeful reflective

4.0

saramdeuri's review against another edition

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challenging emotional hopeful mysterious reflective tense medium-paced

4.0

Such an excellent exploration of language/linguistics and feminism. The bits and pieces of invented documents and speeches etc at the beginning of each chapter really worked in bringing the world alive. You really get to feel for the women, especially Nazareth and Michaela.

they're a lesbian power couple to me...

I'll refrain from writing much here because I feel it's one of those books that works well with minimal knowledge.

The context surrounding the book is super interesting too, what with the author being an accomplished linguist and feminist too. I feel she really achieved what she set out for in this book. I doubt I'll read the rest of the series, because I enjoy the open ending of this one so much, but I'm interested in reading her more academic linguistics stuff.

kmartinix's review

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4.0

The plot of this book is pretty much exactly what the book summary is. Hundreds of years in the future, after all women's rights are revoked, they work to create their own language. And the whole time I'm reading it I'm thinking "how is talking in a coded language going to help much? Everyone around you is a master language translator they'd not last long sending coded messages

But that really isn't the point of this. The whole book is subtly reminding us what language does, it allows communication. And languages aren't 1 to 1, they're created from experiences and thoughts. If one people group have different experiences then others, their language might not just have different words for things, but different concepts and this didn't fully click with me until the end of the book.

I still think this book has a lot of problems, way too much time spent from the men POV discussing how flawed women are or business, and the women POV seem to be single-note. Characters don't change much through the book, theres one chapter where a POV character has an emotional arc, but other than that it's pretty lowkey.

lleullawgyffes's review

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challenging dark hopeful reflective medium-paced

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

5.0

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