Femlandia - Christina Dalcher

Reading Challenge Category: Free ARC from NetGalley

Official Blurb:

The United States has sunk into total collapse.
Men in positions of power have wrecked the economy and left women to suffer and pick up the pieces.
Miranda Reynolds has lost her husband, her job and her home. There’s only one place left that she and her daughter Emma can go. Femlandia.
Femlandia is a female-only community. A utopia for women. There’s a reason Miranda never joined before. Now she has no choice.
With what Miranda knows about Femlandia’s founder, she’s right to be wary. While life outside the gates is fraught with danger, there’s something just as sinister going on within.

My Thoughts:

Well, this was certainly an odd one, although I didn’t expect anything else after having previously read ‘Vox’.
Femlandia is another dystopian future whereby we are thrown right into the chaos. The downfall and disorder are already in full throttle, and we have no idea, to begin with, how the world got to be like this. We initially meet Miranda and Emma as they are losing the last of their belongings and have nowhere to turn for survival. They have a few days worth of food, and Miranda has to start thinking of doing something she swore she never would in order to give her daughter, Emma, the best chance to live through this nightmare.
I found the timeline at the beginning to be quite confusing as Miranda has a tendency to reminisce about how things were a few weeks earlier and if only she’d acted sooner. She intermingles these thoughts with the present and with those of further in the past. 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.
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. The story moves away from how Miranda can simply survive; she now needs to conform to the idea that all men and everything associated with men is evil. There are many questions about how such a place could thrive without men, and these questions get answered in the most horrific way possible as Miranda refuses to accept everything at face value.
I did enjoy reading this book, but there were times that I got a little confused about what was happening. Such as by the gate when Miranda ends up injured afterwards. I have no idea what happened, did some attack? Did she fall over? It was all a bit blurry, and I thought it would be cleared up later on, but it wasn’t. I was also frustrated with the Emma side of things. If Jen hadn’t have cosseted Emma, maybe Miranda wouldn’t have felt the need to act as she had. However, Jen purposely poked the bear with what she did, so this side of the storyline felt a little weak.
Overall, however, it was an excellent read. Very dark and maybe not the right sort of genre to read when our real world feels like we are living in a dystopian nightmare but ‘enjoyable’ nonetheless.

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