Only Ever Yours is Irish author Louise O’Neill’s first novel and it’s remarkable. You know how some books stay with you, or basically haunt you? This is one of those. She creates an extreme and disturbing dystopian world that is still very credible. Think The Handmaid’s Tale. It messed with my head so much that I had to tell other people about it—I needed to get it off my chest to spread some of the feeling of disturbance around.

I’ll give you a basic setup of the world of the book. Men control virtually everything. Or, they control everything that matters, leaving a few women in charge of controlling the “designed” girls that are brought up entirely to satisfy the all-important men in one way or another. They are test tube babies, basically, and each have a number assigned to them (their model number). Everything they do relates to a specific cohort of young men. Each year, the society designs three times as many girls as there are two-year-old boys. The girls’ roles are determined on their sixteenth birthday, where they will each become a companion (the designated son-breeding machine assigned to one of the cohort), a concubine, or a “teacher” at the center they themselves were raised in.

O’Neill’s main character is called frieda (aka #630) and the book is told entirely from her (very warped) perspective. She’s approaching her sixteenth “design day.” frieda doesn’t know how messed up her world is and O’Neill does a magnificent job of withholding details of that world, letting just enough info leak out to keep you really interested. You know throughout the book that the ending isn’t going to be nice—whatever role she is assigned, it’s terrible. All the girls strive to be companions, but even that has a very disturbing consequence, besides the inherent being-a-slave part. But the ending still surprised me.

The world is so extreme that some might find it hard to buy into. After all, the girls all are basically willing participants in a system they don’t question. But I found it credible because girls and women have a track record of participating in their own subjugation (judging others for not wearing enough makeup or for dressing “slutty”, voting for a man who has bragged about sexually assaulting women, or in more extreme cases, forcing young girls to marry or arranging cliteredectomies… the list goes on).

You can buy Only Ever Yours on Amazon