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A review by mikhaela_reid
He, She and It by Marge Piercy
5.0
Jewish girl in dystopian future meets cyborg, and falls in love. Jewish girl in 1600s Prague meets golem, and falls in love.
As much as I enjoyed The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, when it comes to books involving golems in Prague, this book takes the blue ribbon. Kavalier took me a while to get in to, but He, She and It gripped me from the beginning and I could NOT put it down. He, She and It is many things--Jewish feminist fiction, a robot love story, dystopian science fiction, cyperpunk sci fi, fiction about class, fiction about corporatization, fiction about environmental disaster and fiction about gender and love and storytelling and armed resistance. It's beautifully written with wonderfully complicated and fascinating characters.
The book has two main parallel stories. The first follows Shira, a woman living in a dystopian cyberpunk future controlled by a handful of oppressive corporations. Her mother is a renegade lesbian terrorist (or freedom fighter) and her grandmother is a genetic scientist who lives in a small Jewish village off the grid. When her husband is awarded sole custody of their son in a bitter divorce, Shira goes to live with her grandmother in the Jewish free zone and falls in love with the illegal cyborg created to defend the zone.
The second story, told by the grandmother, follows a the daughter of a rabbi in the Jewish ghetto of 1600s Prague. Fearing for the lives of his community, the rabbi creates a golem to defend the ghetto. His independent and intellectual daughter falls in love with said golem.
But honestly, no review can do this amazing book justice. I plan to read it many, many times.
As much as I enjoyed The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, when it comes to books involving golems in Prague, this book takes the blue ribbon. Kavalier took me a while to get in to, but He, She and It gripped me from the beginning and I could NOT put it down. He, She and It is many things--Jewish feminist fiction, a robot love story, dystopian science fiction, cyperpunk sci fi, fiction about class, fiction about corporatization, fiction about environmental disaster and fiction about gender and love and storytelling and armed resistance. It's beautifully written with wonderfully complicated and fascinating characters.
The book has two main parallel stories. The first follows Shira, a woman living in a dystopian cyberpunk future controlled by a handful of oppressive corporations. Her mother is a renegade lesbian terrorist (or freedom fighter) and her grandmother is a genetic scientist who lives in a small Jewish village off the grid. When her husband is awarded sole custody of their son in a bitter divorce, Shira goes to live with her grandmother in the Jewish free zone and falls in love with the illegal cyborg created to defend the zone.
The second story, told by the grandmother, follows a the daughter of a rabbi in the Jewish ghetto of 1600s Prague. Fearing for the lives of his community, the rabbi creates a golem to defend the ghetto. His independent and intellectual daughter falls in love with said golem.
But honestly, no review can do this amazing book justice. I plan to read it many, many times.