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3.66 AVERAGE
3.66 AVERAGE
Reminiscent of The Handmaid’s Tale with a dash of zombie apocalypse (hold the zombies) and a hint of magical realism. I love the way UPS and the postal service become enemies in this imagined future Minnesota.
A true roller coaster of a novel that ends on a deeply melancholic note.
Children of Men meets The Handmaid’s Tale meets climate change. Loved it. Can’t wait to read more by this author.
Many reviewers have compared this book to The Handmaid's Tale. Yes, it covers the same ground as The Handmaid's Tale, but it's told in a completely different way. There are a lot big questions raised in this book and our slide toward religious dystopia is only one of them. One reviewer said the writing was not as good as The Handmaid's Tale; I disagree. It's every bit as good, but it reminds me more of Saramago than Atwood, if you can picture that. I was totally drawn into Cedar's story of her pregnancy and her rumination on God and the Saints. I particularly liked the pages of the depressive Eddy's diary that were inserted here and there. But, at this juncture anyway, I can't give this book five stars, because I was ultimately left unsatisfied. But still: Better than your average novel.
I think I really liked this book. Right now, I'm not sure how I feel about the ending, but there is so much beauty in it that I still want to reread in the future.
Like other reviewers, I felt that the story resembled The Handmaid's Tale too much. I also would have liked more exploration and explanation into what was happening in the world. I listened to the book while working in my garden and that is why I finished it. Had I been reading it, I would have likely abandoned the book about halfway through.
This book is intense! Fast and riveting read!
Love that this is a novel with a very realistic vision of the evangelical military USA future (or in a way the present), and that it's told with so much love by someone who knows about childbirth and mothering, yet does not have an arch or ahistorical vantage as the most famous dystopian women as childbearing drones book. I love too that there are lots of Native and brown characters, and a lot of realism. Embellished with a lot of joy and hope, which I'm sure was a challenge. Someone on here said that it didn't "go anywhere" which sort of says to me that person was looking for plot driven rather than character driven. Erdrich is colossal at rendering the current and immediate in literature that seems mulled (The Sentence does this enormously).