One time I thoughtfully set up a wonderful, utopian room for my cats to be cats in.
And oh, was she a cat.
Review: Only Ever Yours by Louise O’Neill
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
Review: Beauty Queens by Libba Bray
I read this book over a year ago and it currently still my favorite recent-ish read. It’s absolutely hilarious—I laughed out loud over and over. And it’s also genius. It cleverly highlights the ridiculous expectations society has on teen girls and women in general. The humor focuses on using the absurd and the book plays with stereotypes to great comic effect. Bray manages to create realistic and believable characters using US state stereotypes as the template. Eventually, she turns everything on its head.
In the book, contestants in a teen beauty pageant crash land on a desert island. Only thirteen of them survive, representing a little bit of everything. One Indian-American, one African-American, a Jewish girl, and a bunch of white WASPy girls hailing from states all over the country. Miss Texas—Taylor—is awesome. She takes charge the way a bold Texan should (even making them woo-hoo enthusiastically), making sure to keep up the propriety these girls are used to: “Miss Montana? Is that the way a Miss Teen Dream sits, all slutty like that with her hoo-hoo showing?”
One of the girls spends the duration with an airline serving tray embedded in her forehead. Taylor admonishes her for being upset—“let’s not get all down in the bummer basement where the creepy things live.”
When they’re taking stock of the skills and knowledge they have, Jennifer tells everyone that her family traditions are alcoholism, dysfunction, and “anything you can make from government cheese.”
But my favorite is Adina, Miss New Hampshire, who entered the contest as a joke and is my personal hero. She missed the memo about the societal rule that a respectable girl doesn’t say anything about herself that might be construed as bragging.
I won’t spoil the fun for you, but I have to say when the hot pirates show up, I thought I would die from laughing.
One last thing: I listened to the audiobook, which was one of the best ones I’ve ever listened to. It was narrated by the author herself, and she does different voices for all the characters–often, I find this annoying, but here it totally works (maybe because I trust her to know what she was imagining when she wrote it).
You can buy Beauty Queens on Amazon