MixedFresh FictionThe bleak dystopian feeling can be immersive ... We meet moral quandaries, but the story is quite straightforward reading ... I was interested in seeing how the internal, inter-character and situational conflicts would be resolved by the author. Some of them get partially resolved and some do not, owing to a set-piece from a Jacobean tragedy; an easy escape, for which an early character was chided, seems to be the standby. Diverse characterisation is also scarce. We might have met more women, except that our guide Miranda most annoyingly spends almost all her time at Femlandia either unconscious, locked up for a month reading herstorys and womyn-authored fiction, or secretly creeping around the complex ... I suggest that this layered account could be read by an advanced late teen reader, only if they can cope with graphic violence; or by an adult, either for a psychological thriller or a deeper dive into aspects of the dystopian concept.
