The antagonists in this book are the women who started the women-only colony, and they are supremely messed up for a lot of reasons, but one of them that is never even addressed is their casual transphobia. Meanwhile, the protagonist is the walking embodiment of #NotAllMen. There is no one to root for, and nothing profound or new to say about gender politics. Wish I’d skipped this one.

A feminist horror story which was a promising concept, but ended up mediocre.

None of this made sense. The author tried to walk a line between #NotAllMen and #KillAllMen and it was a sloppy, confusing, mess of what exactly is your point with some unexamined TERFiness for good measure. Blech.

Ok ça fait réfléchir mais j’ai l’impression que c’était un peu problématique parfois

"I want to tell her civilization is a construct, an abstraction dependent on thousands of trivial variables."

"The few boyfriends and lovers I had. [...] wore This is What a Feminist Looks Like T-shirts and ate kale. It's hard to fear a man who eats kale."

"I don't know how to think about money when it's not in use, when there's nowhere to spend it and nothing to spend it on."

"What struck me then, and what strikes me now, was the thought of that man once being someone's baby. And just that word, "baby," would make me want to cry. I would imagine a woman in a clean hospital bed, pushing until she couldn't push any longer, sweating and swearing as her child came out into the world, and I would try to trace all the miserable steps that might take that tiny, helpless thing toward the vagabond holding out his hand and asking for a dime, a coffee, a cigarette, anything to get him through the next hour of his miserable life. I'd name those steps: neglect, abuse, ignorance, hunger, each one closing the gap between the baby and the man it would become."

"Choice is such a tricky concept, maybe a little like freedom. Freedom is fine, until you add another word at the end of it all. You're free to do what you want...but. Sure, go ahead...unless. Some inner philosopher of mine asks what happens to choice if we qualify it."

"Women are shamed for this kind of curiosity, cursed for its devastating, world-ruining effects. Much more than men, I think [...]. Where are the Bible stories and myths about men screwing everything up? Why are women always compared to cats, curious and relentless, happily wreaking havoc because they just. Want. To. Know the goddamned answer? Why all this, and never a thought to the fact that more men have torn up the world than women?"

Femlandia takes place in the near future during the next great depression, some kind of financial apocalypse situation. The point of view switches between Miranda, a recently widowed mother whose husband left her with massive debt and no way to provide for her teenage daughter, and flashbacks from the point of view of Win, Miranda’s late estranged mother and the radical feminist founder of a string of self-sufficient women-only communes. Miranda, who swore she would never set foot in Femlandia, has no choice but to flee there. But once she’s there, she finds that her mother’s feminist utopia is hiding some dark secrets.

I knew going into this book that the author had a reputation for some pretty dark and disturbing content in her books, but man. Parts of this book were really hard to get through. This book reminded me of The Road in some pretty significant ways, and the journey on foot to Femlandia is the least of them. I will say that it ends on a hopeful note, though.

Mother-daughter relationships are a major theme in this book. The relationship between Win and Miranda is beyond fraught – there is toxic resentment and genuine hatred on both sides. The relationship between Miranda and her daughter Emma seems, at first, to be close and very loving, though it turns out to be very complicated, especially once Win’s adopted daughter Jen enters the picture. Jen is the perfect hyperfeminist daughter Win always wanted Miranda to be – a fact which Win made known to Jen and Miranda both.

Both of our POV characters have biases (understandable ones, but still biases) coloring their narration - Win is far worse than Miranda, but Miranda still has her blind spots - so if you’re a person who can’t deal with an unreliable narrator, this is probably not the book for you.

TW: Suicide, rape, child abuse, child molestation, violence, gore, transphobia, misogyny, misandry, cult environment, psychological torture, gaslighting

I received an ARC of this ebook from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I enjoyed this. Its not great literature but it's engaging and easy to read. I was not happy with the epilogue. Why did it go back to a patriarchal society as if that was the natural order of things. Disappointing.