Name: Lindy's review of The Book of the Unnamed Midwife by Meg Elison
Item: The Book of the Unnamed Midwife
Rating: 3
Author: Lindy

Meg Elison

Philip K. Dick Award Winner for Distinguished Science Fiction When she fell asleep, the world was doomed. When she awoke, it was dead. In the wake of a fever that decimated the earth's population--killing women and children and making childbirth deadly for the mother and infant--the midwife must pick her way through the bones of the world she once knew to find her place in this dangerous new one. Gone are the pillars of civilization. All that remains is power--and the strong who possess it. A few women like her survived, though they are scarce. Even fewer are safe from the clans of men, who, driven by fear, seek to control those remaining. To preserve her freedom, she dons men's clothing, goes by false names, and avoids as many people as possible. But as the world continues to grapple with its terrible circumstances, she'll discover a role greater than chasing a pale imitation of independence. After all, if humanity is to be reborn, someone must be its guide.

The Book of the Unnamed Midwife

Megan

Lindy

I'm conflicted about this book. I enjoyed it I guess, but it's just amateurish/under-edited enough that I'm skeptical of the current 4.14 star goodreads average. For example, it's clear at the beginning that the protagonist's motive is to protect other women from male violence, but somewhere around the halfway point that gets buried and isn't replaced with another goal. I also found Jodi's characterization to be clunky. Finally, I'm not sure what role the Unnamed Midwife/the text is implied to have in the time of the prologue and epilogue-- historical, sure, but the terminology suggests it's morally instructive and I don't get that at all. Nonetheless, I am sufficiently intrigued by this world and its characters that I have put The Book of Etta on hold at the library. It will probably answer some of my questions.

Amazing depiction of humanity at its worst and at its most hopeful

Jessica O’Reilly

Meagan Fischer 

One of the more memorable and moving post apocalyptic books I've encountered. Maybe I'll say more later.

Lacy W

Okay. Bear with me because this book is going to sound hella confusing but it will make sense in the end. I promise. I felt the same way when I started this book. 

The book officially starts in some sort of monastery or something. There is Mother Ina and her little pupils. They are copying the Book of the Unnamed Midwife. I know, this sounds really weird but it makes all sorts of sense in the end.

So like the little blurb said, there is a plague or something like it that causes almost a mass wipe out of the human race. It starts with a fever and then it's basically death. It affected everybody but especially women and children. Those that were pregnant gave birth to dead babies or the babies died shortly after. It's awful really. I couldn't imagine living through that.

We follow the tale of the unnamed midwife. Her name is unknown and she doesn't tell anybody her name, she goes by fake ones and dresses like a dude, like it was mentioned in the little blurb. She was actually a midwife as well. She helped deliver babies in the hospital she worked in. She gets sick and falls into what I assume is a coma. 

She wakes up and discovers just how messed up the world is. She realizes that women have now become a hot commodity and men will do just about anything to have one and treat them in anyway they see fit. And I mean  in any way.  She travels around the United States, giving birth control to women she sees and tries to help them as best she can. 

The journal entries, that are written by the unnamed midwife, that are in the book are written very weird. But I suppose if you think you have a limited time on earth, best to get your thoughts out as fast as possible. It's almost as if she had some sort of break in her mind. The words are choppy, lots of repetition. The psychologist in me sensed something deeper happened with her sickness but I can't know for certain. As weird as the entries sound, they actually contribute to the story.

The unnamed midwife does meet people along the way. She lives with some of them even for long periods of time. After she leaves them, you also get a story about what happened after she left them or if they left her. Which I really liked because in stories like these, I often wonder what happen to those that get left behind. 

I really enjoyed this book a lot more than I thought I was going too. The most I've read of dystopian is  The 5th Wave  and The Hunger Games . I promised myself that I was going to start branching out and I feel like I have. I now have a book that I really enjoyed and I can't wait for the sequel. I hope it is just as good as this one.

Melyssa Tromberg 

4.5; this book is unlike anything I have ever read, it's going to take me a while to process

Kelsey Lynn

So far this is the biggest contender for "Biggest Disappointment of 2016".

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". 

It sounded so interesting, great title, won the Philip K Dick award, I was sold. So when I received it from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review I was looking forward to it like crazy. 

However, this book was just terribly written. The author says herself in her about me that she "writes like she's running out of time" and honestly, you can tell. This book feels like it wasn't planned at all, that she just wrote everything that came to her mind and shoved it in there with little concern about what it would do to the story. Or she wrote down all these interesting bits, and then shoved them together and said, "it's a book!". It felt like it was supposed to be important, it was supposed to make you see harsh truths and feel uncomfortable. The set up meant it'd explore rape and women as possessions, a chance at a truly powerful story. But it was so empty, nothing important or powerful whatsoever. How an editor approved the glaring issues in this book is beyond me. How it won the Philip K. Dick is even further beyond. I plan on seeing what then other nominations were, unless there were none. 

This story opens up in the future when a group of children are given the task of scribing an important series of journals. These journals are known by everyone and have been read by all, they are a sacred window into the early fall of society. The author then goes straight into the expected journal (why have the framework of the kids scribing journals if she wasn't going to have her book be in journal form right?) following a woman who is unnamed (but goes by many throughout the book) who is a nurse and midwife describing the early stages of the epidemic. Society has begun to panic a little as there is a 100% mortality rate in pregnant women, and woman and men are coming down with the fever everywhere. Our story then abruptly changes from journal format (after maybe three paragraphs) and then goes into 3rd person (I'll... complain about this later) and switches back and forth between journal, 3rd person, and omnipresent throughout. Our nurse wakes up on a cot in her break room at the hospital. Supposedly weeks later, as all her food in her home is decaying and moldy. She wakes up with no life support or IV (ok at this point I'll look past this) and wonders into the completely wrecked world. The city is empty and partially burned, looted, bodies all over. She goes home, is immediately almost raped by some random man (cause men get super rapey within weeks, I'm sorry I'm sorry I'll wait till later). Then takes off on a journey to who knows where, encountering few on the way, dressing as a man, and administering birth control to the woman she can find (all slaves and controlled). 

That's literally all I can say without spoilers. Also, I cannot contain my rant, sooo let us start with the major issue with this book. The frame the author created using the kids. She set it up to be an important story, she set it up to be a journal. But then she doesn't commit. She ditches the journal nearly immediately, writing in a style that has things the kids cannot know, so what is the point. What's worse is the majority of the stuff in the 3rd person view could have easily been rewritten to be in journal form. Having just finished "We" by Yevgeny Tarteskovy (sp?) which was completely done in a stream of conscience journal form, the whole story, and done well, this bothered me extremely. But giving the debut a chance I convinced myself to look past it. Then the unrealistic start to the story. She wakes up (while admittedly at a hospital) in the BREAK ROOM on a COT, no simple "she pulled the IV out" to make it remotely plausible she was unconscious for a long time. The body can only survive 3 days without water. So without any assistance, she couldn't have been out for longer than 3 days. However when she goes home, her food is rotten, and she talks about how it's been weeks. WEEKS. Okay, okay, I'll look past it, it's a debut, it won an award, it'll get better. Immediately things get rapey. I get it, not a lot of ladies, SOME men will get rapey, but the chance that the first man she meets is rapey after only a few weeks of pure societal collapse seems slim. It doesn't help that nearly every man she encounters is rapey. The character also thinks about men in a TERRIBLE way, a way that if it was being written about women would cause a lot of angry people. The portrayal of men, and thoughts regarding men, just seem like the author is projecting some Man-Hate. I tried to look past this too. In this world, all men are crazy sexual, or maybe the epidemic killed all but the over sexual, rapey, couldn't last a few weeks without sex before becoming a monster people. So now I'm at overlooking two major aspects of the book, and one arguably minor one. 

The other HUGE problem with this book for me was the mid-wife herself. I hated her, I could not find any level to connect with her. She was mean, cynical, the kind of person that is judgemental and holier than thou. Rather than just saying she's pan-sexual (I get it, cause I consider myself pan-sexual it's about people, not genders) she thinks " I could educate them about gender fluidity but I doubt they could understand it", give me a break. She thought she was the last real person on earth, she was so full of herself it was sickening. Her actions and responses rarely made sense, and honestly, by the end of the book, she just seemed like a garbage person. She cursed like a sailor and not in a fun way, in a Jesus, you curse a lot way. Which feels weird coming from me (I curse a lot haha). She tried to be fiercely independent but instead came off as stubborn and ridiculous. But whatever, debut, I'll look past it.

So back to the journal. Seriously, what is the point of setting up the book with a framing mechanism, the children transcribing her journals, if you aren't going to stick to your framing mechanism. It didn't help that when she did write in her journal she wrote in a style= terrible= weird weird weird style. No joke, I've never seen so many "=" and she had a habit of repeating words three times. I started to think it was a tick. A sentence would seriously go " Lake house= cool vacation home= raid potential= people, want to avoid people, avoid people, avoid people" it was... obnoxious. I think the author was going for a stream of consciousness kind of writing, but there are much better ways of doing that. 

I found myself highlighting multiple passages, not for great quotes but to add a note: "what" "this doesn't make sense" "but that's not what the person is saying at all". One passage literally had a character admit they know that their companions will never come back, only to have her think two sentences later "he refuses to admit they aren't coming back", but... he did admit it, two sentences ago... The book was horribly disjointed. It gets worse when she gets to the Mormon town when she's constantly belittling them for trying to have a semblance of normalcy, it's not that they don't admit to what happened. They call themselves survivors and call travelers refugees and are absolutely aware of what happened, they just are trying to create a town and live again. She seriously spends the whole time going "they're so blind, pretending nothing happened, pretending the world isn't over" literally giving them crap for wanting to find some kind of happiness. I wanted her to move on from this part of the book only to realize I was nearly 80% so this was the main part. I also began to realize that I spent 80% going " I'll overlook this issue and see if it gets better" but I'm overlooking essentially the whole book by this time. It's that broken, I had to overlook everything. I may as well have been given a piece of paper with bullet points of the story.

Shortly after the Mormon town, the book takes a complete and utter dive off a cliff. It has random passages telling what happened to characters she has no way of knowing what happened to, these are done in a god perspective, taking us all over the world, once again rendering the children and that framing mechanism completely useless. Not only this but it got... awkward and explicit. I thought when reviews warned it got explicit that it would be in a "you need to read this and be uncomfortable because this is the reality of rape and sexual abuse" kind of way. But it wasn't. It was in a "she is just a sex-crazed as the men and starts talking explicitly with someone's husband" way. Describing sex and lady bits graphically, and thinking about sex and lady bits, and using unnecessary terms to do it. I'm not an "oooh nooo sex" gal. I read raunchy books, but I am a girl who hates unneeded explicit sex or reference to sex that detracts and doesn't add to the story at all. This literally takes up the majority of the remaining book. If you're going to add explicit sexual descriptions, make it worth it, don't make it random and out of place. This book could have used that to make a point of sexual abuse. But rather chose to play that card for some weird self gratification and obviously just for the, well, sex. It added nothing.

So by the end, nothing important happened. Nothing important enough that every future person would read this book and act like it was important. She didn't encounter enough people to be a good story of the end of the world as we knew it. She didn't learn anything, she was a pretty nasty person till the end. The majority of the book is spent not on what the world is like, but her describing sex to a Mormon guy in detail. Why would that be important to the future? I spent the majority of the book trying to make excuses for the book, and the rest being angry and annoyed. This book was a waste. A wasted chance on a good concept, a wasted chance traded for absolute worthless drivel and characters and interactions that are shallow and unrealistic. The author was all over the place. She had no idea how to put her thoughts together. She wrote the same story as multiple types of books than just shoved them all together. She didn't have a plan for her character. She had a cool title and couple of passages and just tried to make it work. It didn't.

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. 

This needs to go to an editor and be re-written and 75% of the plot needs to change. Then maybe this won't be a waste of a concept. 

I'm done for now with this rant. I've got to move on from this book.

Worst of 2016 for sure.

I'm sure many will go, Oh you're being too harsh, it's great for a debut. Or, It's better than how you write this review is littered with grammatical errors. 

But honestly, when do we stop lowering our expectations and ignoring glaring problems for debuts. I've read amazing debuts and bad ones where the author improved later. That doesn't mean we need to pretend the bad one is better than it is because it's first. Also just because I can't write for anything doesn't mean I can't tell bad writing. 

If you like this style of book, I swear to you there are better ones out there.

Megan Williams

I have to be honest that I started this novel and something kept me from continuing after the first couple of pages. I don't know if it was the tone of the novel or the way the perspective was written, but I really struggled to get into this novel and and become captured with this world. I couldn't finish this book but maybe this will be one of those novels I will go back to and find my stride. So far I haven't been able to become invested.

Laura Kehoe

Actual rating is 3 1/2

I received a copy of this from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

The Book of the Unnamed Midwife is a dark, sometimes disturbing story that shows a post-apocalyptic world where a plague has wiped out almost all of the women and children, and a good portion of the men as well. The best way I can describe this book is a mixture of The Road and Mad Max, with a bit of The Handmaid's Tale thrown in as well. 

First off, I really appreciated the diversity in this book. I mean, you've got characters who are bisexual, gay, asexual (it's not explicitly stated, but that's the impression I got)...and POC characters too. Plus HELLO BAD ASS LADIES. This book was described as a feminist novel and it does not disappoint in that regard. 

As fascinating as this book was, I found myself getting bored in some parts. There were entire sections where it seemed nothing happened. The narrator spent a lot of time wandering around on her own, with no real sense of where she was going. It made for some very slow parts. Although, these slower sections did allow for the opportunity to really get to know the narrator. I had a very easy time connecting with her, which helped pull me through the less exciting parts of the book. 

That being said, this book is definitely not light reading. It tackles some disturbing and heavy issues; including rape, murder, child abuse, and a whole host of other issues. I feel these topics were handled well for the most part, however. And I will say this for The Book of the Unnamed Midwife: it makes you think. I finished the book yesterday evening and spent most of the night going over in my mind what I'd just read. 

I wouldn't recommend this book to everyone because of all the topics broached. But, if you're willing and able to push through the disturbing parts, you'll find a thought-provoking novel that will likely stay with you long after it's finished.

Tejumola Niquel

Am I glad I read this book? Yes. Do I want to continue the series? Yes. Would I read this again? No. The book is slow to progress, and left me wanting more. I didn’t really feel for the characters and I felt like by the end I barely knew anything about the midwife. The last 4 chapters picked up momentum pretty rapidly, but it left me with more questions than answers. I thought the ending was satisfying, but I definitely wish more omniscient explanation would have happened throughout the book rather than just towards the end.

Megan &
The Book of the Unnamed Midwife by Meg Elison

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