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The Book of the Unnamed Midwife
Écrit par Meg Elison
Raconté par Angela Dawe
Actions du livre
Commencer à écouter- Éditeur:
- Brilliance Audio
- Sortie:
- Oct 11, 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781531830892
- Format:
- Livre audio
Description
A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2016 and Philip K. Dick Award Winner
When she fell asleep, the world was doomed. When she awoke, it was dead.
In the wake of a fever that decimated the earth's population-killing women and children and making childbirth deadly for the mother and infant-the midwife must pick her way through the bones of the world she once knew to find her place in this dangerous new one. Gone are the pillars of civilization. All that remains is power-and the strong who possess it.
A few women like her survived, though they are scarce. Even fewer are safe from the clans of men, who, driven by fear, seek to control those remaining. To preserve her freedom, she dons men's clothing, goes by false names, and avoids as many people as possible. But as the world continues to grapple with its terrible circumstances, she'll discover a role greater than chasing a pale imitation of independence.
After all, if humanity is to be reborn, someone must be its guide.
Informations sur le livre
The Book of the Unnamed Midwife
Écrit par Meg Elison
Raconté par Angela Dawe
Description
A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2016 and Philip K. Dick Award Winner
When she fell asleep, the world was doomed. When she awoke, it was dead.
In the wake of a fever that decimated the earth's population-killing women and children and making childbirth deadly for the mother and infant-the midwife must pick her way through the bones of the world she once knew to find her place in this dangerous new one. Gone are the pillars of civilization. All that remains is power-and the strong who possess it.
A few women like her survived, though they are scarce. Even fewer are safe from the clans of men, who, driven by fear, seek to control those remaining. To preserve her freedom, she dons men's clothing, goes by false names, and avoids as many people as possible. But as the world continues to grapple with its terrible circumstances, she'll discover a role greater than chasing a pale imitation of independence.
After all, if humanity is to be reborn, someone must be its guide.
- Éditeur:
- Brilliance Audio
- Sortie:
- Oct 11, 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781531830892
- Format:
- Livre audio
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Avis
From the very first page of this novel, I was hooked. The premise, the prose, the characters ... everything was so gritty and raw and perfect. Reading about the struggles of the main protagonist (who remains nameless throughout this story) gave me an adrenaline rush while also horrifying me at the same time. The events that transpire are both gruesome and completely realistic ... which makes it scarier than any horror movie. The emotions and scenarios that are people are thrust into really make you think about how well you know a person. This novel is more than just a dystopian fiction; it is a novel that explores the realm of sexuality, independence, women's rights, and the value of life. I cannot state enough how much of a fantastic novel this is, so please do yourself a favour and check it out! I promise it will not disappoint.
Her journey is mostly solitary, dressing as a man to keep safer, writing down her thoughts and observations as she makes her way north then west across country. The few situations she comes across where women are being captive she makes deals to get alone time with them and gives them birth control to try and help them avoid pregnancies and potential death. The Florence Nightingale of women's health so to speak. There were many memorable lines in this story but the one that I keep thinking about is when they talk about a couple she spent time with and their story ends with the line "They lived together the rest of their lives and never saw another human being." It just strikes a nerve....thinking about spending the rest of your life and NEVER seeing anyone else. It's mind boggling.
The ending of the book described some new characters in other parts of the world that sounded super interesting and I was so pleased to see that there is another book coming out. I'll definitely be getting it.
To me this was a very realistic view of what could potentially happen one day and it was a very insightful look at what it means to be truly alone.
I enjoyed this book. The main character, who is unnamed is in the midst of a dystopian future that makes her career obsolete. How she survives makes for an interesting story.
I had recently reread The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, another dystopian novel with women's roles as the theme. I have to wonder which vision of the future I would prefer to live in and what the main character from each book would think of the others lives. Even though both books were different I had a sense if familiarity. Both portray woman as victims/yet strong. Both had dim views of possible futures with just a possibility of hope.
Just like in the novel REBECCA, we never learn the main character's name in this book. Hence the title!
I discovered Meg Elison through a few short stories she's written for horror anthologies and magazines and I decided that I wanted to try one of her novels. This one was recently on sale and to add the audio to the Kindle version didn't break the bank, and here we are.
THE BOOK of the UNNAMED MIDWIFE was a bleak post-apocalyptic tale wherein a disease wipes out nearly every woman on the planet. The scarcity of women soon becomes a problem for those that did survive the disease. Will they also be able to survive the wandering groups of men, many of whom haven't seen a woman in over a year? You'll have to read this to find out.
I loved the main character in this novel. Yeah, she swore a lot, was bisexual and independent. (These are a few aspects other reviews have pointed out as being negative; I actually enjoyed them.) I liked how her previous work as a nurse and midwife helped her to try to save other women she came across in her travels. I also respected her intelligence-dressing as a man to disguise her gender and doing whatever else needed to be done.
I enjoyed the way the story was presented with one exception. This tale was introduced as being the main character's diary, and a woman is having some young boys transcribe it decades later. As such, this is mostly a first person narrative; except that in a few spots the tale slipped into a third person narrative and that did not quite make sense to me, as there was no way our heroine could know these things. (Though I was happy to learn the facts related during those portions, to be sure.) That is the only gripe I had with the book.
Post apocalyptic fiction doesn't capture my attention as much as it once did, but this book rose above the normal PA tale. I was engrossed and invested and I wanted our unnamed hero to win, though "winning" was hard to classify-other than just surviving.
I should also mention that the narrator was most excellent and managed to believably deliver a number of different characters and accents. Kudos to Angela Dawe!
To wrap up here, I highly recommend this book and/or the audiobook if that's your thing, most especially to fans of post apocalyptic fiction and strong female characters!
*I bought this book & the audiobook with my hard earned money and this is my honest opinion.*
Imagine a plague that grabs hold of humanity ruthlessly. A fever that wipes out millions of the Earth's inhabitants. A world where women and children are a rarity. That is the world that the midwife wakes up to.
Went to sleep and the world was dying --- woke up and it was dead and gone.
I was completely sucked into this post-apocalyptic novel. No women left after a fever has wreaked havoc on the world. The few women survivors are hunted like an endangered species trapped, sold, traded, and still dying in childbirth. I was absorbed in the novel early on and it took lead in my currently reading stack.
There were a lot of things that I absolutely loved about this one. I loved that we followed the plague through the eyes of a medical professional and a midwife in particular (shout out to all the amazing and wonderful midwives out there). It was a horrible and honest account of death and despair from the pages of her personal diary. She cussed and rambled, complained and theorized the way anyone does in their diary and it was entirely believable. If I didn't know any better, I would have thought it was truth.
Another part I loved about this novel is that it was open about sexuality. We live in a world where men love men and women love women, and that was not forgotten when the world ended. The first people the midwife encounters are a gay couple doing what it takes to survive. Her next encounter makes her decide to change her appearance and behavior, because if she is going to survive, which she is, she must pose as a man to keep herself safe.
But again, sexuality is fluid pre-plague and aside from the lack of women, sexuality remains fluid. There are women that capitalize on their rarity by forming what are called hives where one woman controls multiple men through sex. The midwife is open about her relationships with both men and women. The entire approach to LGBT is what I loved. It isn't stigmatized or something disgusting, it is just a matter of fact that people yearn, desire, and need to be with other people.
It's not like that. I like people. They come with the bodies they come with.
I also loved that the story comes from the midwife's diary. It's such a great concept to tell how the world is crumbling and what the midwife has to do to survive through her own words. It isn't the first post-apocalyptic novel to do so, but it does it very well. It was so realistic. Her journals are the beginning of society rewriting history.
The only part I did not like about this novel was the font, and that is more of a personal preference than anything. On my kindle, the parts that were written in the diary were in a script that was hard for me to read. When I turned the publisher's font off, it was so large that only a few sentences filled up my screen, while everything else was the perfect size. It was annoying and, at times, distracting, but only a small fly in the ointment.
The Book of Etta, the sequel, is next on my TBR list. I loved this book and Elison is a fantastic writer that had me staying up late to read what happened next.
And, if the world ever starts to end, I'm keeping a diary.
Meg Elison’s novel is set in the aftermath of a largely unexplained plague that has decimated the world population, especially women, who number only ten percent of the survivors. Childbirth appears impossible through most of the narrative, though we know this will change since the narrative structure has most of the text as the diary of the unnamed midwife as preserved by a future civilization. The unnamed midwife takes on various false names throughout the text, so I’ll simply refer to her as UM. And speaking of narrative structure, Ms. Elison uses symbols like “=” in the diary entries to stand in for words and presumably give the feel of a real handwritten diary. Maybe I’m just old, but I found this narrative gimmick annoying and it kept grabbing my attention and pulling me out of the text. Perhaps young readers are more used to this kind of thing from text messaging and don’t find it so annoying.
UMs story begins in the immediate aftermath and is quite engaging. As you can imagine, there is the immediate need to survive and find a way to get along in a rapidly devolving society. There is the expected violence, and with the sexual imbalance it is particularly harrowing for women. These parts are particularly ugly and ring all too true. UM was a labor and delivery nurse before the world fell apart, so she is particularly devastated by the inability of babies to survive birth in the aftermath of the plague.
UM travels widely through this post-apocalyptic world both physically and emotionally. Ms. Elison does a particularly good job of carrying the readers’ emotions along with those of UM. At first, I thought UM was going to evolve the attitude of the atheist mocking religious enclaves that survived. At another point, I thought she was going to take the opposite course and evolve into a religious true-believer. She never quite does either, and it is a very interesting journey the reader takes along with her. All in all, I think this novel is a worthy winner of the PDK award.