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A review by liralen
The Ballad of Ami Miles by Kristy Dallas Alley
3.0
Apocalypse cults and religion, oh my! This one’s a bit different from a lot of doomsday-religion books in that the apocalypse (so to speak) has happened—Ami’s family has gone off the grid, to be sure, but then…the entire grid has gone off the grid. Something has affected women’s reproductive capabilities to the extent that, over the decades, humanity has become a shadow of its former self. A few women can still reproduce…and in the hopes that she might be one of them, Ami’s family has found her a husband.
Although she’s never questioned her upbringing or her family’s beliefs, Ami takes the first opportunity she gets to run: to seek out her mother, who, according to new information, is only a few miles away. And the world Ami finds outside forces her to question everything she’d held to be true.
Conceptually I liked this, but in practice, my god, everything moves so fast. Ami gets off her compound and to a bigger compound with non-religious people (it’s never clear how much of the world has survived, or what it looks like beyond their small bubbles—who else is out there? We don’t know), and they immediately set about changing her mind about everything. They’re a liberal haven, even by current (real-world, non-dystopia) standards: peaceful, organic living in which everyone collaborates, and everyone is actively anti-racist and anti-homophobic and so on and so forth. And that’s great! But…I had a very hard time believing that Ami, who has never had the slightest conception that homosexuality even exists, would leap straight from an extremely cloistered, conservative, religious upbringing in which it was understood that the biggest thing she could ever do was marry a man and make babies to ‘ohhhh now I understand that I feel this way about a girl, and here’s the one for me!’ in about…two days? Like, there’s literally another teenager who’s supposed to be the Big Cheese of the teenagers who goes on a little walk with Ami, tells her about homosexuality, and then barely utters a peep for the rest of the book. It’s like that with other things, too: Ami’s been told her whole life that the mixing of races is bad (and that, presumably, white people are superior), but as soon as someone explains otherwise, she goes ‘oh, I guess my family’s way of thinking is racist and wrong’ and changes her worldview.
I suspect that the author didn’t want to let Ami be entrenched in racism for long because that would make her an unsympathetic character, and sure, I get that. But…I don’t buy it. Sure, it takes her a minute, but that’s only relative to, e.g., how quickly she gets used to the idea that she might be gay. My preference (as, to be fair, someone who is very often grumble-grumble-there-is-too-much-romance-in-this-book) would have been to take out the romance altogether and give Ami more time and space to change her mind about things, maybe eventually realising at the end of the book that she might be more into girls than boys but not because of someone specific.
I also don’t buy that even this hippie-go-liberal compound would (in a world that seems to have very few people left in it) be so staunchly pro-choice—not just when it comes to abortion but also when it comes to having, or trying to have, kids in the first place. They’re apparently surviving well enough, so I guess it’s working out for them, but I struggled to see how a community of about sixty people could sustain itself for generations if the majority of the women aren’t fertile and not all of those women are going to try to have children. (This isn’t an argument for all of them trying: it’s an argument for a much more complex discussion in the book.)
Also, a small grumpy-reader note: The trip that took me five days to walk took only two going upriver on the boat (210) … We docked at the fishing camp… It took us two more days to walk inland to the hi-way, and then there it was, Heavenly Shepherd (213) … “We’ve been traveling for two days, and we need to rest,” I said (216). So it’s two days of travel or four? Another thing we’ll never know.
Ultimately what I think I was missing is the bigger picture. There’s apparently still some government left? I guess? But what form it takes, or what the population is, or how spread out…no idea. No idea what’s going on in other countries. No idea if the population is still on a decline. No idea what other small communities are doing. No sense of external, or even really internal, threat. So many questions!
Although she’s never questioned her upbringing or her family’s beliefs, Ami takes the first opportunity she gets to run: to seek out her mother, who, according to new information, is only a few miles away. And the world Ami finds outside forces her to question everything she’d held to be true.
Conceptually I liked this, but in practice, my god, everything moves so fast. Ami gets off her compound and to a bigger compound with non-religious people (it’s never clear how much of the world has survived, or what it looks like beyond their small bubbles—who else is out there? We don’t know), and they immediately set about changing her mind about everything. They’re a liberal haven, even by current (real-world, non-dystopia) standards: peaceful, organic living in which everyone collaborates, and everyone is actively anti-racist and anti-homophobic and so on and so forth. And that’s great! But…I had a very hard time believing that Ami, who has never had the slightest conception that homosexuality even exists, would leap straight from an extremely cloistered, conservative, religious upbringing in which it was understood that the biggest thing she could ever do was marry a man and make babies to ‘ohhhh now I understand that I feel this way about a girl, and here’s the one for me!’ in about…two days? Like, there’s literally another teenager who’s supposed to be the Big Cheese of the teenagers who goes on a little walk with Ami, tells her about homosexuality, and then barely utters a peep for the rest of the book. It’s like that with other things, too: Ami’s been told her whole life that the mixing of races is bad (and that, presumably, white people are superior), but as soon as someone explains otherwise, she goes ‘oh, I guess my family’s way of thinking is racist and wrong’ and changes her worldview.
I suspect that the author didn’t want to let Ami be entrenched in racism for long because that would make her an unsympathetic character, and sure, I get that. But…I don’t buy it. Sure, it takes her a minute, but that’s only relative to, e.g., how quickly she gets used to the idea that she might be gay. My preference (as, to be fair, someone who is very often grumble-grumble-there-is-too-much-romance-in-this-book) would have been to take out the romance altogether and give Ami more time and space to change her mind about things, maybe eventually realising at the end of the book that she might be more into girls than boys but not because of someone specific.
I also don’t buy that even this hippie-go-liberal compound would (in a world that seems to have very few people left in it) be so staunchly pro-choice—not just when it comes to abortion but also when it comes to having, or trying to have, kids in the first place. They’re apparently surviving well enough, so I guess it’s working out for them, but I struggled to see how a community of about sixty people could sustain itself for generations if the majority of the women aren’t fertile and not all of those women are going to try to have children. (This isn’t an argument for all of them trying: it’s an argument for a much more complex discussion in the book.)
Also, a small grumpy-reader note: The trip that took me five days to walk took only two going upriver on the boat (210) … We docked at the fishing camp… It took us two more days to walk inland to the hi-way, and then there it was, Heavenly Shepherd (213) … “We’ve been traveling for two days, and we need to rest,” I said (216). So it’s two days of travel or four? Another thing we’ll never know.
Ultimately what I think I was missing is the bigger picture. There’s apparently still some government left? I guess? But what form it takes, or what the population is, or how spread out…no idea. No idea what’s going on in other countries. No idea if the population is still on a decline. No idea what other small communities are doing. No sense of external, or even really internal, threat. So many questions!