Hey friends! Guess what? This is my first Cannonball Read review of the year…I’m a little behind. Hahaha…have no fear, I’ve read a lot of books and I’m almost done with teaching for the year so my own Cannonball challenge will be, can I catch up with the review part?!?! Stay tuned!
This book though…this book brought me out of review hibernation because I kept trying to think of cool titles for my review. Some of the discarded ones were:
I’m a Fungi: Tales of a Mushroom Fucker
The Last of Us: Spores! Spores! Spores! (a take on Girls! Girls! Girls!)
Sexy Spores and Other Lies I’ve Been Told
I never did come up with a good title, but I had fun trying. Here’s the gist of this very short book. All the women of the world (?) or at the very least all the women from this area where the book takes place have died of a strange pandemic and the men are left to form agrarian societies. We never know how many men are left, where the other men are or what else is happening as we stay with a very small group known as the Group in a place called Valley of the Rocks. They are playing the long game of waiting for extinction as there are no women left. But Nate feels certain there will be a sign of change. Soon enough there is.
Nate notices that mushrooms are springing up on the graves on the women, strange and interesting yellow mushrooms. Nate is the community story teller. His job is to remember the women and share tales of their individual and collective pasts. He understands that his job has power because his stories are often taken as the “truth” but truthfully, they are his accounts and are sometimes embellished on purpose or due to human memory being what it is. One night when he’s out trying to help his Uncle Ted, he gets pulled down into the earth where he is taken care of by a “mushroom woman” ( I can’t do justice to the description so here it is from the book: “[a] woman. A thing. It is yellow and spongy and limbed, with a smooth round ball for a head. It is without eyes, without ears”.) At first, Nate is horrified by it/her and then later they have sex because they bond telepathically and also phyiscally. When Nate leaves the ground burrow (WOMB!!!)where he met Bee (he’s since named her), he takes her and others back to the camp because he knows that the Beauty (the collective of fungal ladies who have grown from the corpses of all of their wives, mothers and sisters) want to join the group and be with the men…to be loved? And here is where the story focuses on breaking down traditional gender roles as well as biological sex roles…because it’s not too long after this that young Thomas becomes pregnant and this is where roles reverse.
The Beauty does all the hard labor because they’re much stronger than the men. There are members of the Beauty who have branched off because they have no mates and are now called The Unloved. They prove to be potential threats to the men because they want to mate. Interestingly enough, the younger men embrace the change in the breaking down of gender constructs. Some men are wearing dresses because they’re more comfortable. Thomas is sad because he feels tired and ugly at times throughout the pregnancy (same, Thomas, same). The older men are horrified when Holly the first hybrid child is born, the others feel as though she must be protected at all costs because she could be the future of Mankind (Mushkind?).
The story is an interesting one that is well written, I wish it had been longer. I feel like it never really “got going”. I was pretty horrified by The Beauty, and while I was totally cool with the guys wearing dresses and enjoying cooking and caring for each other (like people!! Truly, we all know these aren’t “female traits”), I think there’s so much more here that’s ripe for a story…perhaps some spores will spread and take seed in future stories by Ms. Whiteley!