VOX

by Christina Dalcher

[ibeforem]

I had mixed feelings about this book. It's certainly a horrifying scenario -- after the election of a very conservative president, the rights of all women have slowly been eroded away. As the story opens, they are not allowed to work, not allowed to read, and not allowed to speak more than 100 words a day. Even children are subject to these rules, with schools segregated by not only gender but by what they are allowed to learn.

Unless you have something they want, which is the situation Jean finds herself in. Jean, an accomplished doctor and researcher in how the brain processes speech, would love to fight back. Except her husband works for the president and she's afraid of the repercussions for her young daughter. Then the president's right-hand man comes to her with an offer -- come work for us, and you will again be able to speak.

There's a lot going on here -- oppression, resistance, infidelity, hope, terror -- with little glimpses of how they ended up in that situation peppered in along the way. But while I found the scenario very scary, I didn't find it to be very believable. Mostly because I don't believe, in a million years, that the wives of those (presumably Southern and Christian) bible-thumping men who made the laws would ever go along with it. Those proper Southern ladies may look "obedient" in public, but we all know who rules the roost at home. And I also thought the pacing of the story was off. Things move along quite slowly until bam! Everything happens at once. I would have rather had some of the middle compressed in favor of elaborating on what happens in the end.

All-in-all, this wasn't a bad book, just could have been better. If you liked The Handmaid's Tale, you will likely appreciate Vox as the dystopian nightmare it tries to be.