None of this made sense. The author tried to walk a line between #NotAllMen and #KillAllMen and it was a sloppy, confusing, mess of what exactly is your point with some unexamined TERFiness for good measure. Blech.

Ok ça fait réfléchir mais j’ai l’impression que c’était un peu problématique parfois

"I want to tell her civilization is a construct, an abstraction dependent on thousands of trivial variables."

"The few boyfriends and lovers I had. [...] wore This is What a Feminist Looks Like T-shirts and ate kale. It's hard to fear a man who eats kale."

"I don't know how to think about money when it's not in use, when there's nowhere to spend it and nothing to spend it on."

"What struck me then, and what strikes me now, was the thought of that man once being someone's baby. And just that word, "baby," would make me want to cry. I would imagine a woman in a clean hospital bed, pushing until she couldn't push any longer, sweating and swearing as her child came out into the world, and I would try to trace all the miserable steps that might take that tiny, helpless thing toward the vagabond holding out his hand and asking for a dime, a coffee, a cigarette, anything to get him through the next hour of his miserable life. I'd name those steps: neglect, abuse, ignorance, hunger, each one closing the gap between the baby and the man it would become."

"Choice is such a tricky concept, maybe a little like freedom. Freedom is fine, until you add another word at the end of it all. You're free to do what you want...but. Sure, go ahead...unless. Some inner philosopher of mine asks what happens to choice if we qualify it."

"Women are shamed for this kind of curiosity, cursed for its devastating, world-ruining effects. Much more than men, I think [...]. Where are the Bible stories and myths about men screwing everything up? Why are women always compared to cats, curious and relentless, happily wreaking havoc because they just. Want. To. Know the goddamned answer? Why all this, and never a thought to the fact that more men have torn up the world than women?"

Femlandia takes place in the near future during the next great depression, some kind of financial apocalypse situation. The point of view switches between Miranda, a recently widowed mother whose husband left her with massive debt and no way to provide for her teenage daughter, and flashbacks from the point of view of Win, Miranda’s late estranged mother and the radical feminist founder of a string of self-sufficient women-only communes. Miranda, who swore she would never set foot in Femlandia, has no choice but to flee there. But once she’s there, she finds that her mother’s feminist utopia is hiding some dark secrets.

I knew going into this book that the author had a reputation for some pretty dark and disturbing content in her books, but man. Parts of this book were really hard to get through. This book reminded me of The Road in some pretty significant ways, and the journey on foot to Femlandia is the least of them. I will say that it ends on a hopeful note, though.

Mother-daughter relationships are a major theme in this book. The relationship between Win and Miranda is beyond fraught – there is toxic resentment and genuine hatred on both sides. The relationship between Miranda and her daughter Emma seems, at first, to be close and very loving, though it turns out to be very complicated, especially once Win’s adopted daughter Jen enters the picture. Jen is the perfect hyperfeminist daughter Win always wanted Miranda to be – a fact which Win made known to Jen and Miranda both.

Both of our POV characters have biases (understandable ones, but still biases) coloring their narration - Win is far worse than Miranda, but Miranda still has her blind spots - so if you’re a person who can’t deal with an unreliable narrator, this is probably not the book for you.

TW: Suicide, rape, child abuse, child molestation, violence, gore, transphobia, misogyny, misandry, cult environment, psychological torture, gaslighting

I received an ARC of this ebook from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I enjoyed this. Its not great literature but it's engaging and easy to read. I was not happy with the epilogue. Why did it go back to a patriarchal society as if that was the natural order of things. Disappointing.

3.5/5

DNF. Got 1/5 in and couldn’t stomach it. The author’s portrayal of feminism - even her portrayal of misandry - is so lacking in nuance, so shallow. It feels like feminism written by a conservative TERF.

As soon as I heard the premise of Christina Dalcher's Femlandia, I knew I wanted to read it. This book was compelling and I was very invested, but I have mixed feelings about it. Femlandia surprised me at just how horrifying and dystopian the feminist utopia turned out to be. Nothing about this book is subtle or nuanced. Dalcher creates a horrifying dystopian society where American government has collapsed and anarchy reigns. Miranda is a pregnant newly widowed mom struggling to find a safe place in the world for her, the baby on the way, and her 16-year-old daughter. Miranda and her family were wealthy and privileged, and now they have nothing. At wit's end, she turns to Femlandia, the feminist ideal her estranged mother established years before the apocalypse officially arrived.

Subtle, this book is not. I think my biggest problem with the book was that the characters were so often caricatures rather than people.

All in all, this is a solid dystopian read with eerie parallels to our own world.

I gave up at 33%. I draw the line at transphobia. Even if the reason behind it was to prove some kind of evil it was half-arsed done and reeked of using a hot button issue to try and make a book better than what it is.