3.5/5

DNF. Got 1/5 in and couldn’t stomach it. The author’s portrayal of feminism - even her portrayal of misandry - is so lacking in nuance, so shallow. It feels like feminism written by a conservative TERF.

As soon as I heard the premise of Christina Dalcher's Femlandia, I knew I wanted to read it. This book was compelling and I was very invested, but I have mixed feelings about it. Femlandia surprised me at just how horrifying and dystopian the feminist utopia turned out to be. Nothing about this book is subtle or nuanced. Dalcher creates a horrifying dystopian society where American government has collapsed and anarchy reigns. Miranda is a pregnant newly widowed mom struggling to find a safe place in the world for her, the baby on the way, and her 16-year-old daughter. Miranda and her family were wealthy and privileged, and now they have nothing. At wit's end, she turns to Femlandia, the feminist ideal her estranged mother established years before the apocalypse officially arrived.

Subtle, this book is not. I think my biggest problem with the book was that the characters were so often caricatures rather than people.

All in all, this is a solid dystopian read with eerie parallels to our own world.

I gave up at 33%. I draw the line at transphobia. Even if the reason behind it was to prove some kind of evil it was half-arsed done and reeked of using a hot button issue to try and make a book better than what it is.

Final rating : 3.5/5

Christina Dalcher is a raging TERF and her books are getting worse each time. This time it really shows though and it might finally be enough to stop me reading her books even ironically.

I love Dystopian fiction. Vox and Q are two of my favourite books so I was excited to start a new book by this author.

I am in two minds over this book however. I found it quite slow to get into and couldn't completely work out what was going on at first. There was some sort of economic crash leading to a post apocalyptic world but there are no details... The story is told by Miranda who along with her sixteen year old daughter Emma, is struggling to find food and survive. I found some of the scenes a bit disturbing to read at the start and one was particularly horrific.

Once I got to about a third of the way through the book I was gripped and couldn't put it down however. Miranda and Emma arrive at Femlandia, a commune founded on the hatred of men, purely for women. The community has huge electric barbed wire fences surrounding it but was this to keep people out or to keep the women inside? I was racing through the pages at this point. Was it really the idealic place that it seemed? What were the women hiding? There was clearly something sinister going on!

Although there is a clear resolution which I liked I found the ending slightly disappointing, a bit too predictable and slightly rushed.
Overall I loved the premise of the book but I found it didn't quite deliver in the same way as the previous two novels. I love Christina Dalcher's original ideas though so will definitely read her next book!

I felt eh about this. Someone else hit it on the nose in their review that the storytelling elements were just not there. What could have been so interesting about the story--the intricacies of how the group functions, glimpses into their food production, anything beyond mentioning they have a pool and a cafe (how do they keep their electricity?!)--wasn't there. It was all very black and white.