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A review by tasharobinson
The Women's War by Jenna Glass
4.0
This has been billed as something of an epic-fantasy answer to Naomi Alderman's The Power, set in a deeply misogynistic collection of kingdoms where, depending on the country, women are treated as anything between third-class citizens and barely sentient breeding devices. (For instance, even in one of the more lenient countries, families who don't want their daughters, or men who don't want their wives, can repudiate them, at which point they're forced to go to "the Abbey" and sell their sexual services to anyone who wants them, while giving all the proceeds to the throne.)
Then three women give up their lives to enact a giant spell that changes the nature of the world: suddenly, women can't be coerced into bearing children, and will only conceive if they truly want to. This is meant to change the world and give women new power, but initially, it only works like The Pill did: suddenly women are having more casual sex, since they aren't risking pregnancy. What really shifts the balance of power is a whole bunch of apparent additional side effects involving the author's magic system, side effects that keep getting revealed nearly to the end of the novel.
For me, that was fairly unsatisfying for a while, because I was pretty curious how the childbirth change alone could shift society in time to save the many suffering primary characters in the novel, who are all facing problems ranging from forced marriage to awful men, to execution for crimes they didn't commit. And instead, the rules of magic and engagement keep changing. This book moves very quickly, with characters rapidly shifting in ways that sometimes seem more like inconsistencies than development. And on top of that, the characters are generally pretty shallow types — vicious tyrant, devoted mom, young queen, precocious teen — who mostly fall into a few distinct black-and-white baskets: horrible abusers or noble, desperate strivers.
But all that said, once I settled down and got into the book not being what I expected, and got to the parts of the book that actually acclimate readers to the way the world works, I found this a pretty compelling read. The magic system is unlike anything I've read before, which is interesting all on its own, and there are a lot of interesting aspects of that magic system in terms of how the specific things people can build and do with it shape society, like what it means to be able to easily build tireless horse-replacements, or infallible magical messenger-carriers. And it's interesting to see how this world's inherent sexism plays out in radically different ways in different countries, rather than being a monoculture. I'm kind of a sucker for stories about injustice and the fight against it (see also: my GRRM fandom), so even when it happens kind of rapidly and shallowly, I'm generally down for a story about a radical feminist movement against a cruel and selfish ruler.
That said, man is there a lot of rape and torture and systemic abuse of women in this book. The rape is glossed over (and as others have noticed, the survivor narratives mostly consist of "but they were used to this kind of thing and they moved on") and the torture happens offscreen, without pages devoted to it, but it can still be a little wearying for the empathetic.
Then three women give up their lives to enact a giant spell that changes the nature of the world: suddenly, women can't be coerced into bearing children, and will only conceive if they truly want to. This is meant to change the world and give women new power, but initially, it only works like The Pill did: suddenly women are having more casual sex, since they aren't risking pregnancy. What really shifts the balance of power is a whole bunch of apparent additional side effects involving the author's magic system, side effects that keep getting revealed nearly to the end of the novel.
For me, that was fairly unsatisfying for a while, because I was pretty curious how the childbirth change alone could shift society in time to save the many suffering primary characters in the novel, who are all facing problems ranging from forced marriage to awful men, to execution for crimes they didn't commit. And instead, the rules of magic and engagement keep changing. This book moves very quickly, with characters rapidly shifting in ways that sometimes seem more like inconsistencies than development. And on top of that, the characters are generally pretty shallow types — vicious tyrant, devoted mom, young queen, precocious teen — who mostly fall into a few distinct black-and-white baskets: horrible abusers or noble, desperate strivers.
But all that said, once I settled down and got into the book not being what I expected, and got to the parts of the book that actually acclimate readers to the way the world works, I found this a pretty compelling read. The magic system is unlike anything I've read before, which is interesting all on its own, and there are a lot of interesting aspects of that magic system in terms of how the specific things people can build and do with it shape society, like what it means to be able to easily build tireless horse-replacements, or infallible magical messenger-carriers. And it's interesting to see how this world's inherent sexism plays out in radically different ways in different countries, rather than being a monoculture. I'm kind of a sucker for stories about injustice and the fight against it (see also: my GRRM fandom), so even when it happens kind of rapidly and shallowly, I'm generally down for a story about a radical feminist movement against a cruel and selfish ruler.
That said, man is there a lot of rape and torture and systemic abuse of women in this book. The rape is glossed over (and as others have noticed, the survivor narratives mostly consist of "but they were used to this kind of thing and they moved on") and the torture happens offscreen, without pages devoted to it, but it can still be a little wearying for the empathetic.