The Book of the Unnamed Midwife by Meg Elison
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Thanks to Netgalley for this ARC.

Post-Apocalyptic survivalism, featuring perhaps the very last midwife upon the planet.

This wasn't a particularly easy novel to get through, mostly for the emotions and the horror of what would likely happen to the surviving women after 98% of all men die from a virus and only 1/100 of that counts as women.

The author makes a pretty convincing case that what would result would be massive maltreatment of the rare women, mirroring what still happens today, but much worse, with enormous ignorance, rape, and misogyny the likes that we haven't seen since that freaking rally last week or GamerGate. Only instead of words, it's pure hellish actions.

The novel has a large number of journalism-ish stories making up the early days all the way to through the first viable children after so many died with their mothers, even after the grand majority of the human race kicked it.

In these respects, the novel is like a cross between The Children of Men and The Handmaid's Tale and a large crop of The Walking Dead, Book One.

I really appreciated it. I've been missing some serious and deep look at what it would mean to be so necessary to life and be so disrespected. It was also horrible and fascinating at the same time, but I suppose that is to be expected. Wow.





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