She used to laugh at her feminist friend until shit hit the fan and oh well, maybe the crazy feminist was right. which, hey—your compound, your rules, but since there is no mention of trans men or nonbinary/genderqueer people anywhere in the book, it feels like dalcher just didn't want to have to bother with the complexities of gender identity, and dispensed with the matter, shutting it down in one short paragraph. Although this novel has some mixed reviews (as do her other stories) I might check out Christina Dalchers' previous two novels, as based on the strength of this one I think they would be worth a read.

My biggest concern is the impressionable people reading this book, the young women who think this is an accurate reflection of what needs to happen to the TERF’s of the world having their reasoning that trans women are just men finding another way to abuse women, validated. So you did it, Miranda," Sal Rubio whispered when she signed her name on the forms next to Nick's brother Pete's scrawl.This isn't the way I expected to spend my forty-first birthday, wondering what Emma and I will do from one day to the next, coming inches closer to painting a sign that says Will work for food.

In one of the greatest bits of unintentional character-building I’ve ever encountered, Miranda reveals herself to be the kind of person who tips at Starbucks by rounding up. Although Win is no longer in the spotlight, her protégé Jen Jones has taken Femlandia to new heights: The off-grid colonies are secluded, self-sufficient, and thriving—and Emma is instantly enchanted by this idea of a safe haven. Dalcher can’t conceive of a world that lets trans women in through the gates—and her story is poorer for it.With no home and no money, pregnant Miranda and her daughter Emma, go off to find Femlandia, a women only commune founded by Mirandas mother.

It is a shallow, bland and exclusionary thriller, disguised as "turning a utopia on it's head" like that's something ground-breaking.Dalcher seems to be trying to push the idea that feminism = equality, but does not seem to understand that the reason feminism still exists is that we've not been able to achieve equality in the world we currently live in, so simply stating that there's no difference between men and women is pointless. I cannot remember which because we never see it on screen, although that still doesn't stop it being mentioned every other chapter. So, she and her daughter, Emma, had no choice but to move to a colony of only women, that Miranda’s mother, Win, founded years before. I toss in a dystopian book every once in a while because of this - it feels so vividly real, like this could happen, and that scares the heck out of me. They want to change society, mostly through education, so the differences between sexes (not genders, gender is the problem) disappear.

cut off from the rest of the world, they have been thriving on their own for years, so this little societal collapse is just another day in the life for them. 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. Miranda says she would do anything to protect her young, teenage daughter from harm, but that doesn't stop her from flaunting her about in front of men in hopes of sympathy and/or handouts.

He sounded tired when he told me they were down to a skeleton operation, enough to oversee the animal transfers to another state before the feed ran out and the prize fauna resorted to cannibalism.