Femlandia

Product Information

To everyone else, thank you for reading my review, I hope that I have done enough to help make it clear just how terrible it is. It's really just a backdrop for the real stars of the show - the horrendously titled "Femlandia" communities.

Matrix took the idea of a gated community of women and showed all the angles—the good, the bad, all of the unconsidered subtleties. Airfare would have been more affordable-if we were talking about airfare a year ago or my bank account a few months back, but we're not. Dalcher can’t conceive of a world that lets trans women in through the gates—and her story is poorer for it.Such a twisted turn of events - over and over and over I found myself screaming at the pages, feverishly turning until I found out what would happen. You want to know how people end up homeless, how anyone could turn away or shut a door or hang up a phone?

And, of course, when they arrive, after *incidents*, things aren’t as they seem…cue the dramatic music. Anyone that has been friends with me for a while here on Goodreads knows what my relationship is like with Christina Dalcher's stories. I loved ‘Vox’ because at its heart it carries the strength and determination of women and I thought that it would bear similarities to this story but this read has a very different and much darker tone. Fuck this book and its harmful depictions of feminism, insulting portrayals of men, rampant transphobia, and boring one-dimensional characters.All in all, another good book by Dalcher and I look forward to being scared again by her chilling alternative futures. I expected to have gotten through this book pretty quick, but unfortunately the story was boooorrring, don't believe the hype around this book. Oh yeah, thank you Net Galley and HQ for a digital copy of this book in exchange for a brutally honest review. And those XX chromosomes identifying one as ‘female’ turn up frequently through the rest of the story.

It isn't only the loose kaftans and colorful fabrics that mark them as different from the women I'm accustomed to; it isn't anything they have or wear at all, but rather what they don't have. So Miranda can never take these realizations to their obvious conclusions, and the book ends up feeling like a thematic soup that doesn’t know what it wants to say. We initially meet Miranda and Emma as they are losing the last of their belongings and have nowhere to turn for survival. A true modern horror which exposes the dangers of a world without gender equity and ends with a horrifying sense of circularity. The women only colony, Femlandia,is a place she’s never seen but it may be the only place for refuge.So I did find it quite hard to get into the story without knowing the background to the world she was living in and the different timelines she was weaving in and out of. And so they set off to Femlandia, the women-only colony Miranda’s mother, Win Somers, established decades ago.

As the story progresses and we arrive in Femlandia, a sanctuary for women away from the harshness of what is happening to the rest of the world and away from all men. At one point when she’s remembering overhearing her friends talking shit about how she’d turned into an image-obsessed, designer-wearing, vapid tradwife, I know we’re supposed to think ‘Wow your friends are so mean!I did not like all the misandry which I felt was a bit extreme and left me wondering if there is such a thing as being too feminist. Miranda discovers just how the all-women community is capable of enduring, and it leads her to question how far her mother went to create this perfect, thriving, horrifying society.