Femlandia

Product Information

When I think of last year, of Nick bringing me breakfast in bed and showering me with two dozen yellow roses, I die a little on the inside. She specialized in the phonetics of sound change in Italian and British dialects and taught at universities in the United States, England, and the United Arab Emirates. So Miranda can never take these realizations to their obvious conclusions, and the book ends up feeling like a thematic soup that doesn’t know what it wants to say.

I expected to have gotten through this book pretty quick, but unfortunately the story was boooorrring, don't believe the hype around this book.Only she didn't say "patriarchy"-she pronounced each syllable with a pregnant pause in between; it came out like pay-tree-ar-key. Transwomen are briefly addressed in the beginning, in a rather vile way, when Miranda is ‘inspected’ at the gates of Femlandia to make sure she’s ‘always been a woman’. Well, this was certainly an odd one, although I didn’t expect anything else after having previously read ‘Vox’. It’s still well written, smart, shocking, dark and I think the fans of the author who can absorb dark, bleak sci-fi concepts will enjoy it a lot!

The book centres on Miranda, a woman in her forties pregnant with her second child, heading to Femlandia with her 16 year old daughter Emma after her husband Nick drives off a cliff because he can't handle the financial crisis.I also found it odd that in a book about feminism written in 2021 trans issues were glossed over so easily.

A real meat-and-potatoes kind of person, you used to say when you were talking about someone simple, unpretentious, down-to-earth. Yet what they find when they get there is so much worse than Miranda ever could have imagined and it turns even her own daughter against her. Femlandia felt untidy by comparison; the writing was not as good, the characters were mostly undeveloped and behaved inconsistently, and the storyline itself did not have that feeling of solidity that characterizes Dalcher’s other books.

Alongside this anti-feminist take, the novel is engaged in another, more subtle kind of moral or political argument, one that’s ultimately just as repugnant: a bizarre kind of passionate centrism welded to a grievance-powered feeling of Boomer-flavored righteousness. Perhaps the overall message of this book is that Femlandia would have been a whole lot better if it properly valued wealth, men and heterosexuality. I found the timeline at the beginning to be quite confusing as Miranda has a tendency to reminisce about how things were a few weeks earlier and if only she’d acted sooner. I am a bookseller, I have the context of Dalcher's two previous novels and I am also currently enjoying a "Women of SFF Literature" year, in which 95% of the books I read are written by women of various backgrounds.

as far as the community is concerned, we get very few details about the logistics or political structure or How It All Works. However, now she finds herself homeless, unemployed, with a daughter to support and in a lawless country.

Miranda never agreed with her mother that all men were evil and to be avoided, so Win took Miranda's best friend Jen Jones under her wing as she shared the same values. Some rather nasty and predictable comments about transwomen follow, and then the whole subject is dropped and never mentioned again. I felt like it set the tone for the rest of the book which I did find in all honesty a bit harrowing. I find it impossible to believe this is a coincidence, and I find it painfully unnecessary and cheap.