In the realm of #speculativefiction I've read a lot of ambiguous endings. In this book, the ending is crystal clear, but the beginning... The beginning is one of the most ambiguous I've ever encountered

The unnamed protagonist is the youngest of 40 women in a cage. None of them remembers how they got there, and while most of them have some recollection of their life before, she was only a child when she was taken and has no memory if anything before the cage

One day, an alarm goes off and their captors flee

The door to the cage is ajar

The child and her companions must then navigate the surface world, which none of them recognize, and build amongst themselves a small society of women

They find other cages, but no survivors

The world Harpman creates is bleak, but it's fascinating to view it through the protagonist's eyes. She has a lot to say about what it's like to exist in a female body, but she (who has never known men) has no conception of gender beyond the limited view of the 39 women she was imprisoned with

She knows nothing of love, either familial or romantic, except what she sees in glimpses

It's important to note that the book was written in the 90s, and the conversations about gender identity that predominated then we're not as nuanced as they are today. Still, I find Harpman's exploration to be both thoughtful and thought provoking

Harpman was born in Etterbeek, Belgium, near my mom's hometown, in 1929 to a Jewish family that fled to Casablanca during WWII

Knowing the personal impact of the Holocaust on Harpman and her family makes the dystopian vision she constructed hit even harder

It wasn't always a pleasant book to read, but it will stick with me forever