MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewSome early readers have called The Men transphobic, because transgender women disappear along with the cisgender men. I see what they mean. The novel states that an unexplained force \'had removed every human with a Y chromosome, everyone who’d ever been potentially capable of producing sperm.\' Given that this is an imaginary landscape that Newman could have organized any way she chose, she’s effectively made a strong statement about where transgender people \'belong\': Transgender men remain on Earth with the cisgender women. Some readers will — very reasonably — want to avoid this book because of it ... But for those who do read it, there are other elements worthy of discussion. Evangelyne’s political philosophy of commensalism — a biological term for a relationship between species in which one benefits and the other is not harmed — is fascinating. The sections in the demonic landscape are tremendously unsettling, and perfectly conveyed ... These sections are eerie, propulsive and horrifying ... a book whose disturbing imagination reaches through the page into our world.
Kelly Barnhill
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewAlex, a physics prodigy whose own mother dies six years later, is a plucky, tenacious heroine, selflessly devoted to Beatrice and undaunted by her dismissive father or pervasive 1950s sexism. Is she too perfect to be real? Probably. But a book in which women spontaneously morph into dragons (amid social pressure to forget it ever happened) isn’t aiming for realism, just delightful fun ... This is a lovely motif in the novel: knots of string and twine and wire forming and unraveling, as women try to stop themselves from dragoning. It’s a pleasing metaphor for the ways the ties that bind us to our lives can also hold us down ... Barnhill intersperses a variety of fictional \'found texts\' throughout her narrative, and they make for enjoyable and very funny sketches.
Leni Zumas
RaveThe New York Times Book Review\"Zumas has a perfectly tuned ear for the way measures to restrict women’s lives and enforce social conformity are couched in the moralizing sentimentalism of children’s imagined needs ... [a] lyrical and beautifully observed reflection on women’s lives ... If there is a criticism to be made of this highly absorbing novel, it is that it feels perhaps a shade too contemporary, and never quite reveals the horrors that would surely follow if the pre-Roe v. Wade days were to repeat themselves ... Zumas is a skillful writer, expertly keeping each of her characters in balanced motion, never allowing one to dominate the rest.\
