I Who Have Never Known Men

Amazing. Everyone should read this book, it is so profound and incredible. You’ll feel every emotion reading this book. Wonderful. Wonderful. Wonderful.

it was such an unexpectedly good read for me. i had waited for it for some time (i was somewhere in the 600s originally for the holds list at my library) and i’m happy i did. 173 pages of what i can only compare to being prompted to think—which i haven’t had a book do for me in a while (even though i was simultaneously reading "finger exercises for poets"). it somehow had this really interesting feeling of familiarity with the writing style—something i can only really describe as a vague specificity (this is something a lot of my family and close friends say is a speech pattern of mine lol). it was very descriptive in ways that were clever, without anything outright. there was finality without really providing answers. i really enjoyed the reading experience.

silné!

I’m really glad I read this gem. Honestly, the next time someone says “women are just naturally [insert trait here]” instead of acknowledging society and conditioning, I might just hand them this book and let it do the explaining. The premise alone pulled me in. Forty women are locked in what seems to be an underground bunker. They’ve been there for years. Male guards control their movements. They’re given the basics of modern life but nothing more. No answers. No explanations. We don’t know why they’re there, who put them there, or what the point of it all is. And our narrator? She was raised inside that bunker. She has no memory of the outside world. No understanding of relationships, sex, love, or family beyond what she observes from the other women. This book strips away everything we assume is “natural” about women- nurturing, romantic, maternal, competitive, jealous, dependent, and asks what’s left when you remove men, society, history, and expectation. What parts of identity are innate, and what parts are learned? If you grow up without stories about love, without gender roles modeled for you, without language for certain emotions, do those feelings still exist in the same way? It also deals with even more complicated themes like loneliness, survival, meaning, and what makes us human at all. It definitely left me with homework, and I’m not displeased about it. I finished it feeling open, curious, and a little altered. And I think that’s exactly what it meant to do.

I’m definitely awestruck by this book. Going in, I envisioned Snowpiercer meets The Handmaid’e Tale. I don’t really know what I was hoping for from this book and to be honest it didn’t meet either of my assumptions about it. Instead it was completely its own material. Breathtakingly sad but also intensely hopeful at the same time. It’s just one of those books you will have to read on your own and make a judgment for. It will leave you frustrated, longing for more explanations, and haunted. You’ll theorize about their history and what happened to them, and as humans, we often look for the tragedy’S origins and to seek resolution with the hero’s saving. But you don’t really get any of that with this book. Instead you’re told a very human story with a very human ending. Read the afterword by Sophie Mackintosh if you have it!