The Book of the Unnamed Midwife: 1 (The Road to Nowhere, 1)

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Imagine that the Doomsday is here, underway, and the only thing you can think about is who you're gonna have sex with. Nice, huh? That's how most men in this book operate. I don't find it particularly believable, or even partially, or at all. Frankly, I sort of think that if it does ever strike, there will be other issues, like where are your families/relatives/friends, what to eat, how to deal with illnesses, where to live, what to wear (and this is not gonna be about any fashion statement choice) and where to put all the decaying bodies of the people that didn't survive? I literally can't think of another book that made me this angry. "The Last One" got close (another amazing concept wasted, but far better written), and was #1 for worst of 2016 for me before this, and everything I've read by Fritz Lieber I've hated. But honestly, this book made him look like a fine author. She gives hygiene instructions to the boys, further indicating the value of the books. The book, which is actually a series of journals written by the unnamed Midwife, is the story of how our world became theirs. The Unnamed was Etta’s hero. Not as a Midwife, but as a survivor, a person who could be anything they had to be to survive. ”..." We also get to see the different stages of progressiveness around the world, and how others are dealing with this disease. I loved looking at all the different cultures, and their reactions. I also loved how the author let us see what happened to the characters our midwife meets along the way, even though she never gets to know their fate.

Such People In It", speculative short fiction with alternative history elements (previously unpublished) And I'm not gonna get started on the wooden belly that that gal puts on to symbolize what? Fertility? What for? Scare the poor boys? Respect is best gained when women demonstrate they have fully capable brains and, had I seen some gal put that gear, I would have been the first to suspect her mental faculties aren't quite top-notch. Anyway, everything felt like the book was staged specifically to show men as some kind of beasts. It's basically misogyny in reversal. The Midwife and Roxanne share stories, read trashy romance novels together, and raid homes for supplies including a clownishly huge .357 Magnum which Roxanne keeps. Roxanne describes to Alex how a girl the men also kept as a sex slave became pregnant. She died giving birth, and the baby was stillborn, just as the Midwife saw at UCSF.Angela Dawe can be one of my favorite narrators. But her unique voice has to "fit" the book. She fits this book perfectly. No spoilers, but we get a lot of different gender identities and they're all showcased in ways that even surprised me. I don’t like the term Hive. I don’t think of it like that. We’re more like a web. (c) Come on, give me a break with all the hive-y things, will you? A tightly wound caseworker is pushed out of his comfort zone when he’s sent to observe a remote orphanage for magical children. The world: I love that this book feels simultaneously very wide and very intimate. It's a bit of a road novel (our protagonist, the titular unnamed midwife, travels from SF to Utah), but the moments of quiet domesticity counter the vast bleakness of the world. I love that we get glimpses of the world outside of the midwife's point of view--it makes sense that different cultures would react differently to a plague that kills off most people, but especially women and children. Those little snippets make the world seem wider, make the apocalypse seem more realistic.

Throughout the 20 or so years that the book spans not a single infant survives the birthing process and almost no mothers either. Basically, 98% of Earth's population of men and 99% of Earth's population of women has died from an autoimmune disease. Even though most of the Earth's population has be wiped out, the ratio of men to women is immense. Women become a very sought after commodity. Most are raped, sold, and treated like dogs.

This is a book about survival, hopelessness, death, lust, pain and in the end, a bit of hope. I admired the courage of the author to discuss subjects that I did not see in other similar books For example, she touches suicide and the inability to cope with the destruction and loss. In The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, 98% of Earth's population of men and 99% of Earth's population of women have died from an autoimmune disease. Even though most of the Earth's population was wiped out, the ratio of men to women is immense. And even in the future from the initial outbreak, women are still the most sought-after thing. In this second installment, the timeline is many generations in the future (approximately one-hundred-years), but we get to the community that the unnamed midwife helped build. This current community has adapted so many of the things that we saw in The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, and we get to see that not a lot has changed in this post-apocalyptic world. The supernatural ending made me decrease my rating with one star because I could not see its place in the rough realism that characterized the prose until then. I hope the next book will not be about the supernatural Mormons who save the world. What really got to me was the hypocrisy of the people. I know it's realistic. It already is a big problem nowadays so after the end of the world it can only get worse. Nevertheless, it got to me. Especially having seen what had become of Nowhere was hard because, silly as I am, I saw it as a beacon of hope for "normalcy". *lol* Instead, it's a place where people cannot be who they are, are repressed and get subdued in multiple ways, where one thing is said but not adhered to (like them despising slave traders but wanting to trade with the Lion because it's safer). I was so excited for this book, and it's not even that I was too excited that it was a letdown. This book sounded like everything I'd love; an epidemic that wipes out 98% of humanity, and 99% of women. The book opens it up to be this interesting journalistic look into the fall of humanity, of society as we know it. Plus an image of what a world may be like when there are way more men than women, and what that could result in. "The Handmaids Tale" meets "Children of men or even grittier".

Bosch, Torie (28 January 2016). "This 2014 Sci-Fi Novel Eerily Anticipated the Zika Crisis"– via Slate. Lccn 2017295988 Ocr tesseract 5.0.0-beta-20210815 Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 0.9775 Ocr_module_version 0.0.13 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA-WL-0000246 Openlibrary_edition What made me initially request an ARC of this was that it had won an award in 2014, even though it is just being republished in 2016. Now that I've read this, it deserves every award - all the awards. If I could have people read one book this year, it would be this. El Hugé", a short story centering around a group of small-town teens requisitioning an overgrown pumpkin and destroying it

Finally, I thought the mix between third person narrative and 1st person journals to be of effect and made the read a lot more compelling and me feel deep about some of the characters. After leaving the community the Midwife finds a home that was owned by doomsday preppers, so it has more than enough stored food, wood, guns, and other things she’ll need to survive the winter. Overall, it was a great book, just not the book for me. I am still intrigued by the following book - because Etta seems kinda bad-ass! So, I would definitely recommend this book; unless like me you prefer your fiction on the less brutal side of things. The Book of the Unnamed Midwife.... a really, really good apocalyptic book. If you can stand it. Dark, grim, bleak, scary but also hopeful... in the end. The world is in the grasp of a global flu. Many people get killed, mostly women. No more babies born. The Midwife survives the flu, wakes up in a deserted hospital, only to discover that the world is ruled by a lot of horrific, nasty men. Who rape, enslave women in a brutal way and terrorize the world. Only a handful of women seem to be left in the world. 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.