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Bezig met laden... The Island of Lost Girls (editie 2017)door Manjula Padmanabhan (Auteur)
Informatie over het werkThe island of lost girls door Manjula Padmanabhan
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Meld je aan bij LibraryThing om erachter te komen of je dit boek goed zult vinden. Op dit moment geen Discussie gesprekken over dit boek. Rock solid dystopian future writing and worldbuilding, fabulous bio-mechanics. Interesting body and gender identity stuff. Cruelty to women. Diversity of opinion among women who continue to work together as if women do that. The first novel in this series, Escape, is set in a future dystopian India, one where all women have been eliminated. The men reproduce through cloning, and neutered "drones" carry out the undesirable labor. There's just one woman left alive, Meiji, and Escape chronicles her attempt to escape the country in the company of her uncle (but actually her father), Youngest. It ends with them (if I recall correctly) making it over the border, implying a sequel. Now I am finally reading that long-awaited follow-up, though so many years on, my memory of the original book is vague. The Island of Lost Girls begins with Youngest crossing into the outside world, carrying Meiji on him in a sort of stasis chamber. Youngest has been forcibly made into a woman by the General, the misogynist ruler of India, and the General is letting Youngest go forward as part of a plan to dominate the outside world as he has dominated India. The opening is captivating and intense, as Youngest tries to navigate customs and immigration and find help without being taken advantage of; I liked the woman he meets, Aila, who like Youngest was born a man, but she wanted to transition, unlike him. The novel, however, lost me when Meiji is taken from Youngest and sent to the titular island to be mentally rehabilitated by a group of women, though they steal her memories. The first novel had clear stakes and a strong throughline, but I found this one very amorphous and circular. It's frustrating for a novel about the oppression of women to make its main female character so unessential to the narrative; Meiji's scenes didn't have clear points to me. I wasn't sure what she was trying to do. Which, I think, is the point, but that still leaves it frustrating. Similarly, I felt the stuff with Youngest trying to get to the island (to rescue Meiji and/or do the bidding of the General) went on and on, and the stuff about the deadly competitive games in the outside world seemed tacked on. Weirdly, the part of the novel I tended to enjoy the most were the scenes of the General waiting on his yacht with Aila, I suppose because he had a clear goal and strong desires, no matter how abhorrent, as did Aila. I knew where those scenes were going! The opening has the worldbuilding I enjoyed so much in Escape, but once the action moves to the island, the novel feels too confined. Even if it would ultimately turn out that Meiji and Youngest needed to "escape" again, I think it was a mistake to reduce the scope in the sequel instead of opening it up. geen besprekingen | voeg een bespreking toe
Onderdeel van de reeks(en)
This is the story of Meiji - the only girl who has remained untouched and unmutilated in a country that has savaged its entire female population. Having saved her from certain death in the new Dark Age that has come upon their homeland, her guardian, Youngest, has transported her to the only place where she can remain safe - an Island where wounded girls are, sometimes literally, stitched back together and given a new life. But the Island itself is a menacing place, and Meiji may be in more danger than ever before. Now Youngest must find a way to infiltrate its odd environs to see what has become of his beloved girl, and escape once more...The Island of Lost Girls showcases, yet again, Manjula Padmanabhan's genius at creating searing landscapes and alternate, sometimes brutal, worlds while reaffirming the beauty and the ugliness, the cruelty and the tremendous compassion, that essentially makes us human. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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