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How I discovered this book: in my Kindle library; I've read lots of this author's books before, and downloaded this some time ago.
In a Nutshell: In a post-apocalyptic world, a village exists up a mountain which is ruled by women
The novel is set 70 years after a plague wiped out most of the population, and takes place in a strange village up a mountainside - a matriarchal society, in which the men do as they're told, and women choose husbands to make more daughters from the 'yieldlings' within the village (men who have grown up there), or 'foundlings' - men from outside, who are kidnapped.
The story starts when Jameson is abducted along with 4 other members of a working party. He is chosen as a husband by Wilderness, the daughter of the village Elder. The story is told in the alternate POV chapters of Jameson and Wilderness.
When I first started reading this, I thought, oh, this is fun - a society in which women make men feel as unimportant as the men of the past used to make women feel; some of the parallels amused me, as I saw the foundlings' outrage about aspects of their new lives that the women of history put up with, without question, for hundreds of years. But as the story when on, I saw how sinister it was, and how it was no better than any patriarchal society of the past. Really, it's a story about control, and its evils. Jameson decides to stick with it, as his life back in the post-apocalyptic city wasn't so great, either, and he tries to teach Wilderness that this way of living is far from utopian.
I liked the story a lot; it's original, and Kate Mary's books are always so readable. At first I was a bit unsure about aspects of the world left behind, which is only talked about in vague retrospect, though we do see more evidence later, and of course all post-apocalyptic writers see the effects of disaster differently; no one knows how it actually would be. I was also unsure about the way the villagers talked - in just 70 years they had gone back to talking like something out of a Jane Austen novel, at times, saying things like 'Good morrow' to each other, but later on I understood that this was all part of the initial control by the woman who started the community; when Wilderness meets men from the 'outside', she thinks how strange it is that they 'run their words together'.
Yes, it's good. Recommended!
How interesting! I might have to read this, after submerging myself in 17th society for the last two years.
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