So right after finishing Girls With Sharp Sticks, I went straight into another dystopian nightmare world rooted in the hatred of women. Don’t ask me why. Well here’s why. I was out of library books and had bought Vox on sale a couple of months ago. It was that or back to the Throne of Glass so. Here we are.
Vox is pretty regularly compared to Handmaid’s Tale and for understandable reasons. Both exist in a not-so-distant future in which women are a visibly, unmistakably oppressed class. The difference is that Atwood sets up a world (there have been a record of Incidents and something has happened to fertility rates, making fertile women a scarce resource) in which an insane future can sanely unfold. It makes horrible sense. Dalcher hasn’t even attempted to create the same. It’s just a “what if the government decided women shouldn’t talk.” There’s no impetus. It’s just random. And then the arbitrary limit at 100 words a day? Atwood draws a map, Dalcher’s is the literary equivalent of “… Step 3) Profit.”
Anyway, yeah. It was an interesting premise that a better author might have made into an interesting book. The characters all felt very one-note and the ending was supremely unsatisfying. It was like she was trying to cover her bases of how everyone would react – we have the fighters, the compliers, the converts, the evangelicals. It’s all very rote and way too much happens by coincidence. I can’t quite recommend this one.
The cover is freaking sweet, though.