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lightreadsThe 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.
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.
no subject
Date: 2018-06-17 09:35 pm (UTC)Speaking of childbirth, have you read Dorothy Bryant's The Garden of Eros, 1979? It's a breath-by-breath first-person narration of a first-time blind mom, who's alone in a cabin in the woods. It's available on the Internet Archive:
https://archive.org/details/gardenoferosnove00brya
no subject
Date: 2018-06-17 10:09 pm (UTC)Wow, I have not. bookmarks
no subject
Date: 2018-06-17 11:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-06-18 02:19 am (UTC)(This year's Tiptree winner, _Who Runs the World?_ by Bergin, which is forthcoming in the US under the title _The XY_, is also about the aftermath a plague that drastically reshapes the gender balance--it targets people with Y chromosomes. It's intensely YA in its voice, though, fwiw.)
no subject
Date: 2018-06-18 02:24 am (UTC)Yes, the Tiptree is how I knew about this in the first place, though IIRC it also won the PKD.
I have heard wildly different views on this year's Tiptree winner. I'm slowly working my way through the honor list, so I expect I'll get there eventually.
no subject
Date: 2018-06-18 02:30 am (UTC)I will be interested to hear what you think when you get there!
(I had such ambitious plans of reading the whole honor list -- I was moderating the WisCon panel about the award honorees -- and in the end I read, uh, the winner and the three shortest things on the honor list. Oops. But I got to shout out to Known Associates off the long list, so hey!)
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Date: 2018-06-18 02:32 am (UTC)Yeah, I have a ways to go. Tbf I have a plan of reading the honor list every year and . . . well it has to happen eventually, right?
no subject
Date: 2018-06-18 02:37 am (UTC)basically I mostly read SFF novels these days if I'm on panels about them, so I entirely understand.