Recent reading

[luzula]

Daughters of the North/The Carhullan Army by Sarah Hall (different titles in the US and UK)
As "resistance against dystopia"-novels go, this is a good one, though don't expect a happy ending. It's more realistic than most, too, although I do find it implausible that a repressive UK government would not actually farm the land but import food from the US. I mean, I get that the trend in Western Europe now is for farming to die out because of economic factors (if it isn't subsidized) but I can't imagine that this could continue indefinitely when oil becomes scarce. Anyway, I found the female separatism in the book interesting and well written--it's not the sort of story where a women-only society is magically harmonious. I also liked all the nature and landscape description, because as you know, that is my jam. The story overall feels very rooted in the specific place it's set.

A Girl Must Live by Naomi Mitchison
Short story and poetry collection. I didn't find it as gripping as her novels, but I enjoyed the stories set in the same 'verse as Travel Light and Memoirs of a Spacewoman.

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

I adored Daughters because it captured the didactic purity and subsequent disintegration of the lesbian-feminism I knew in the 70s-80s.

Also the landscape was stunning. It was almost like the hillsides had fallen in with the ideologues: so spiky, so harsh, so total.

[luzula]

Oh, that's interesting, that it reminded you of that movement. I guess I've only been on the edges of the queer-feminist movement of today.

That icon continues to be FTW.