The notes I made whilst reading this book repeatedly featured the phrase "relentlessly miserable". I'm not saying a dystopia should be happy but I felt like I was being beaten over the head with how hopeless we're meant to find this world. And the author occasionally tries to lighten the mood with a bit of violence and horror, just to switch it up. It did make me shudder, horrified, a few times and I did find it difficult to put the book down sometimes at the faster parts, but it was all fairly predictable and there was so much foreshadowing for every plot twist.

Nothing much happens in this book, the plot meanders all over the place. There was a surprising amount of build up before we even reached the titular Femlandia.

Emma became indoctrinated into the feminist cult style thinking really ridiculously easily. I know she's a teenage girl and therefore meant to be easily influenced, and the attack by the random men whilst they were travelling would've made it easier, but she caved so fast. I'm not sure why we showed her reverting to baby gestures and refusing to speak before throwing it immediately away the second she meets Jen. How did she develop trust in this woman so quickly? On the subject of Jen though, how insanely creepy was her relationship with her adoptive mother Win? So gross.

I'm not really sure why we did Win's story broken up throughout Miranda's, it slowed the pace and really only served to highlight how fucking unhinged Win was. This woman killed her husband because she didn't want to give birth to a boy and suspected she was pregnant with a boy? Bizarre. Unless there's something I'm missing and she actually had the gender confirmed somehow.

I just didn't enjoy this book. But I feel like that was meant to be the point? I just didn't enjoy the experience of it at all. It was so miserable, and it was very single minded in its plot, there wasn't anything going on other than the pounding misery of this dystopian nightmare and Win's misandrist rantings interspersed throughout. All of the twists were easily foreseeable. Miranda was bland and forgettable. Did she ever call the police on her mother? Who knows, because this book didn't care enough about that. And this was a recurring theme, the single minded focus on getting back to the misery. Anything that didn't fit the central themes of misandrists being the worst or Miranda teaching a gorilla sign language was just not explored at all, and was only thrown in with a passing interest - a big example of this was the trans issue being dismissed with a transphobic paragraph or two.

And I'm really not sure what the point of the epilogue was. Something about reverting back to gender conventions maybe and human nature and how it relates to gender roles and blah blah? Maybe it was just to show that Emma's pointless pregnancy had meaning in the end? Because everything that we achieved via Emma's pregnancy was already achieved by Miranda's pregnancy in terms of the plot, so it was kind of weird that that was included at all in the first place.

I don't recommend this book. There are better and more subtle books about the horrors of taking things too far in the other direction when it relates to society's misogynistic behaviours.

I received this ARC through Netgalley.