The Book of the Unnamed Midwife: 1 (The Road to Nowhere, 1)

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Unlike other post-apocalyptic books that wash over the disaster and cleanly describes later events down the road, author Meg Elison tells the good, the bad and the ugly of the immediate days afterwards. The reader follows the travels of a lone female survivor after a cataclysmic epidemic has targeted women and babies, leaving a very ugly and stinky male post-pandemic world. Is this a survival novel? Absolutely. Is it as difficult as only cruel-literature can be? Absolutely. These stories aren't for the weak of heart and some people might get overwhelmed by just how evil men can be, but we're meant to see this all in a stark spotlight. PDF / EPUB File Name: The_Book_of_the_Unnamed_Midwife_-_Meg_Elison.pdf, The_Book_of_the_Unnamed_Midwife_-_Meg_Elison.epub We also are introduced to a transwoman in this book who becomes such a pivotal character. Flora completely made my heart break in this book, but she was also such a bright beacon of hope. She honestly deserves the entire world, and she better be given it in the final book, The Book of Flora.

After leaving the community the Midwife finds a home that was owned by doomsday preppers, so it has more than enough stored food, wood, guns, and other things she’ll need to survive the winter. Overall, it was much better than I expect form this Post-Apocalyptic genre. However, I would not recommend it to the faint of heart, to those who have issues with implied rapes, and to those who have low tolerance for violence. I would not like to think that children or those under 18 would read this - I rather they wait until more mature, and no, I am not a prude. The conflict, then, is that Eddy doesn't want to be a mother. She wants to be exactly like her idol, the Unnamed. Sadly, she gets many things wrong because during the roughly 100 years since the Unnamed lived, much of her story has been ... changed (I guess that despite the journals it's much like the game "telephone"). Not to mention the differences that are natural due to the time that has passed and Etta having been brought up differently. Etta comes from Nowhere, a village of survivors of the great plague that wiped away the world that was. In the world that is, women are scarce and childbearing is dangerous…yet desperately necessary for humankind’s future. Mothers and midwives are sacred, but Etta has a different calling. As a scavenger. Loyal to the village but living on her own terms, Etta roams the desolate territory beyond: salvaging useful relics of the ruined past and braving the threat of brutal slave traders, who are seeking women and girls to sell and subjugate. Upon reading this, I was immediately reminded of PD James' 'Children of Men' - after all, how many stories are there which feature a near-future in which universal sterility has afflicted humanity, with the exception of one solitary pregnant woman, who is escorted through a dangerous journey by a former professional midwife? Well, there are at least two!Genital mutilation seems to be the upcoming trend in case of the Apocalypse. Yeah, right, is that an extinction event looming over there? Women are rare? Yeah, let's cut some or other stuff down there just to see if this one dies too?

Following the grand success of her first two books, Elison came up with the third book with the hope that it would achieve the same amount of success as the previous 2 novels, if not more. Author Elison was born on May 10, 1982. She dropped out of high school and joined a community college system in California. Eventually, Elison completed her graduation from Mount San Jacinto College of UC Berkeley. During the early days of her career, Elison was highly active in speaking and writing extensively about early queer identity and poverty. Later, she adopted these topics in her work as well. Currently, Elison resides in Oakland, California and works as a full-time writer. She is grateful to all the love and support she has received from her fans and expects them to continue showering their love for all her future projects as well. THE BOOK of the UNNAMED MIDWIFE was a bleak post-apocalyptic tale wherein a disease wipes out nearly every woman on the planet. The scarcity of women soon becomes a problem for those that did survive the disease. Will they also be able to survive the wandering groups of men, many of whom haven't seen a woman in over a year? You'll have to read this to find out. In general, I got the feeling that the people in this world were far more hard-nosed, with emotions either having been bred out of them or whatever. Of course it's OK to be tough because you need that to survive in such a world, but when you live in a relatively secure and "civilized" settlement but cannot even connect to the people you supposedly love? There is something wrong right there. While James used the sterility as a jumping off point for a musing on faith and the corrupting nature of power, Elison is far more concerned with gender issues. 'The Book of the Unnamed Midwife' lets us know right off that the post-apocalyptic future is matriarchal, with women in charge, and pregnancy revered - perhaps even worshiped. This future society, still struggling, looks to an 'ancient' text as history and guide. This text is the diary of the title's 'midwife.' And from there, we jump into said diary... In The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, 98% of Earth's population of men and 99% of Earth's population of women have died from an autoimmune disease. Even though most of the Earth's population was wiped out, the ratio of men to women is immense. And even in the future from the initial outbreak, women are still the most sought-after thing. In this second installment, the timeline is many generations in the future (approximately one-hundred-years), but we get to the community that the unnamed midwife helped build. This current community has adapted so many of the things that we saw in The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, and we get to see that not a lot has changed in this post-apocalyptic world.

They lit candles against the dark and waited. Without birth, life is only that wait.

Throughout the 20 or so years that the book spans not a single infant survives the birthing process and almost no mothers either.

Now, while I love Station Eleven precisely because it does reject the nihilism of books like The Road, I can appreciate Matthew’s point. Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction that pretends that everything is going to be OK, that we’ll all become happy, chappy farmers free of the evils of the modern world, are, as Matthew points out, indulging in a “ridiculous fantasy”. Books in, books out. Read novels, write a diary. Paper in your hands and silence in your mouth.”..." Meg Elison's 'The Book of the Unnamed Midwife' describes the most intelligent science-fiction dystopia I have read this decade. I thought it brilliant. She has extrapolated from current reality an intense speculative book based on some current civilization trends and a deep understanding of human nature. She’s desperate to keep them from finding out that she is actually a woman but stays for dinner because turning down a communal meal might be seen as suspicious. The Midwife talks of having relationships with both men and women and knowing that Roxanne’s last lover was a woman. She silently wishes that Roxanne would want to have sex with her. Throughout the book, the Midwife finds her own strong urge to have sex surprising given the dire circumstances that might result from doing so.First, right at the beginning the tone is set with the rapist coming into the MC's apartment, forcing her to kill him. That aspect of events was to be expected of course since so many people died and only very few women survived the initial outbreak of the plague. Nevertheless, it is a very difficult topic and the author was very brave in how she portrayed the different viewpoints on it throughout the entire book! After the party leaves, she overhears many wandering bands of men talk about heading to Mexico or other countries further south. Eventually, she finds a car where the radio still works, and hears a repeating message encouraging everyone to “bring their women” south to Costa Rica or Panama. She realizes that there is no way for a radio station to have enough power to broadcast from those countries, she strongly suspects it is a trap of some kind, so she decides to head north. She now has a mission and a direction. Roxanne blithely gathers whatever she can, but Melissa asks the Midwife for something that will end her life without pain. The Midwife refuses but is unsurprised when Melissa is gone in the morning. The Midwife and Roxanne head out without looking for her. A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy. The Midwife comes close to St. Louis she finds another kind of community called Fort Nowhere. It is in an old army fort and even has a few left-over service members in it. Unlike all the other communities and groups discussed in the book, it is run as a free community where members make their own choices about with whom, and if, they want to have sex. She chooses the name Jane and decides to make her home with them.

A harem of three women in the Ukraine chose that day to kill their captor. (c) I don't think it's a good portrayal. The author obviously has no idea just how spirited Ukrainian women are. The guy would have gone bonkers and/or dropped dead the very first day. Finally, I thought the mix between third person narrative and 1st person journals to be of effect and made the read a lot more compelling and me feel deep about some of the characters. I discovered Meg Elison through a few short stories she's written for horror anthologies and magazines and I decided that I wanted to try one of her novels. This one was recently on sale and to add the audio to the Kindle version didn't break the bank, and here we are. The Book of Etta is the follow-up of the extraordinary The Book of the Unnamed Midwife. For more information you can read my review here.

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

This book was too dark for me. Yes, I'm a wuss, and yes I should have known before I started it. But it sounded intriguing, came highly recommended and won a prestigious award, so I read it anyway.