The Book of the Unnamed Midwife by Meg Elison

The Book of the Unnamed Midwife

4/5. A queer midwife in San Francisco is one of the maybe 1% of women who survive a plague. She makes her way through the post-apocalyptic U.S., dressed as a man for safety, distributing birth control where she can because the virus kills almost every pregnant woman and absolutely every fetus.

This is very good, but so stressful that I had to grit my teeth through a lot of it. The threat of rape and enslavement looms over almost every word in this book. The midwife mostly travels alone, passing through the few communities that have sprung up in the wake of societal collapse. The book is about those communities, the various shapes people choose to reorganize themselves in. Or don't choose, as the case may be, under the forces of religion or violence or upbringing.

But mostly, this is fantastic for being about women and birth control in the apocalypse. And the slow death of the species. And how some women choose pregnancy anyway, risk death and the certainty of a dead baby because maybe this time . . . maybe . . . It's inexplicable but explicable both, in the way true things are.

And the end made me genuinely tear up. I've read a lot of birth stories, but oh man. This book is a pandora's box trick, which I knew by halfway through, but it got me anyway.

Content notes: Um. So much rape and enslavement, though mostly off page. Also miscarriage and stillbirth and maternal mortality and, uh, the death of the vast majority of the world's population. It's bleak, I'm not gonna lie.

In Other Lands by Sarah Rees Brennan

In Other Lands

4/5. Expansion of an online novel about Elliot who goes away to school in another dimension when he's thirteen.

Elliot is a delightfully horrible little shit, and the story of him becoming incrementally more capable of forming meaningful connections with other people is wonderful. It's also a story of colonialism around the edges, and cross-cultural communication, and queer teenaged awakenings. It's great, basically.

Also, this book is a great litmus test. If a person calls it Harry Potter fanfic, you can immediately dismiss all their opinions since they clearly have no critical faculties. Brennan has a great note on the page above about all the shitty ways people have called this work fanfic. You know, where people use a perfectly fine and acceptable description as an insult. But anyway, this is specifically not Harry Potter fanfic. It is not in conversation with those books really at all. It does contain a boy-boy-girl friend trio, which to the tiny-minded is apparently enough? Idk. Anyway, my point is that what this does have is a fanfic sensibility, if you know what I mean. I.e. it cares about the things I care about in proportion to how I care about them. Specifically, all the complicated relationship stuff and also there's a plot which illuminates all the complicated relationship stuff. A+.

Knocking one star off for that weird phenomenon where the end of this book did exactly what I wanted it to, relationship wise, without particularly satisfying me. I think Brennan may have hamstrung herself a bit since she wrote this incredible long developed novel after a short story set in the same universe, and the short story kind of boxed a lot of things in.