Scan barcode
A review by tsilverman
Swans & Klons by Nora Olsen
1.0
Holy CRAP this was an awful book. I wish I could mark this as "un-read" and erase it from my memory.
There are spoilers below but this book isn't even worth reading so don't bother.
The premise sounds pretty good: In the future, only women exist and they have 'klons' to do all their work for them. But then our wonderful heroine and her girlfriend uncover a 'shocking' secret that changes their world forever!
Before I read this book, I thought it couldn't possibly be that klons are actually really humans, right? That's way too obvious, too cliche, too STUPID to be the big twist. Well, ladies and gentlemen, here's a first: I was wrong. That was EXACTLY what the plot twist was. So pretty much the message that you can take away from this supposedly feminist book is that if women were in charge, there would be slavery. Ooooooooooooooookay. If I'm reading a futuristic book about a society made up only of women, I expect something like in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's /Herland/, where the women all share everything - food, work, home, possessions. It doesn't have to be perfect, and in fact it shouldn't be perfect because if it was, there would be no conflict, no story. But making the 'human' women have slaves because they are essentially too lazy to do the work themselves is just the complete wrong direction to go with this.
Oh and also: the men. Apparently they died out because of some degenerative disease found in the Y chromosome. They essentially became too stupid to live. No, I'm not kidding.
There are spoilers below but this book isn't even worth reading so don't bother.
The premise sounds pretty good: In the future, only women exist and they have 'klons' to do all their work for them. But then our wonderful heroine and her girlfriend uncover a 'shocking' secret that changes their world forever!
Before I read this book, I thought it couldn't possibly be that klons are actually really humans, right? That's way too obvious, too cliche, too STUPID to be the big twist. Well, ladies and gentlemen, here's a first: I was wrong. That was EXACTLY what the plot twist was. So pretty much the message that you can take away from this supposedly feminist book is that if women were in charge, there would be slavery. Ooooooooooooooookay. If I'm reading a futuristic book about a society made up only of women, I expect something like in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's /Herland/, where the women all share everything - food, work, home, possessions. It doesn't have to be perfect, and in fact it shouldn't be perfect because if it was, there would be no conflict, no story. But making the 'human' women have slaves because they are essentially too lazy to do the work themselves is just the complete wrong direction to go with this.
Oh and also: the men. Apparently they died out because of some degenerative disease found in the Y chromosome. They essentially became too stupid to live. No, I'm not kidding.