The Book of the Unnamed Midwife

Trigger warnings: Spoilerrape, attempted rape, rape of a minor, female genital mutilation

This book! Gah, so intense and interesting. If you're looking for literary SF, this would probably qualify. I'm surprised it's not being talked about more with how popular The Handmaid's Tale has been this year and given the relative popularity of The Passage. As denoted above, there are a ton of potential triggers for readers in this book, so just something to consider. It's not a light book but once you get started, you will probably just read it in one sitting like I did.

Fun, middlebrow, pretty feminist post-apocalyptic novel. I found this via a recommendation by Claude (AI), after I had asked him for “The Last Of Us minus (guns, Carhartt, machismo) and plus social science feelings”. He was bang on the money!

The plot: A plague devastates the Earth, disproportionately killing women and children. Infant and maternal mortalities are basically 100%. Men die off as well, at about 98%. We follow the titular unnamed midwife as she works hectically in San Francisco (!), catches the plague, survives the plague and - like Cillian Murphy - wakes up about 28 days later to an empty, desolate world. The rest of the book follows her on-foot odyssey across the wasteland of the American continent (in the style of The Last Of Us, indeed!), navigating the varieties of Mad Max that have sprung forth.

So there's a lot of similar books to this - the post-apocalypse is an, ahem, very PREGNANT genre, ho ho - and many of them are cleverer. Y: The Last Man came immediately to mind: how would humanity cope if our gender ratio suddenly got very lopsided? So, in a way, this felt very basic post-apocalypse. There's a lot of scavenging, breaking into McMansions looking for guns, shoes and tinned food. There are roaming bands of monstrous men. There are small pockets of communities trying to recreate the civilized life. Honestly, it felt like a video game - like The Last of Us indeed! Also, like The Handmaid's Tale, there are glimpses of a far future that are wonderfully tantalizing.

Despite being very basic in setting, there are some quirks which made me bump this from a 3-star apocalypse to a 4-star one. First of all, the book has a strong progressive sensibility that I deeply, DEEPLY appreciated in this authoritarian 2025. Elison (the author) is quick to set up a progressive perspective on the (white female) character's privileges, etc. The book also has a quirky writing style: we have a primary document (the protagonist's journal entries) interspersed with tight, third person narration of her journey, as well as occasional detours into faraway places. This is all handled well (which is hard tbh!) and it's very satisfying. It reminded me of World War Z's cosmopolitan apocalypse. If anything, I tired of the diary entries and found the Mormon interlude a little high-handed/mean-spirited, even if it was probably, well, accurate.

Another big, BIG pro was the underlying, very basic feminism: reproductive rights were, well, VERY VERY IMPORTANT and kinda the whole point of the journey. The protagonist is no-nonsense, highly practical, and understands that women's power and women's vulnerabilities will be directly tied to their reproductive capacity. Shit is crazy out there, man. And so she immediately hoards all the birth control she can find and sets out on a glorious mission to help the surviving women not become literal chattel for monstrous men. I also found the "hives" - where some of the surviving women kept harems of men - really interesting. The protagonist noted that all of these women were basically incapable of getting pregnant (due to hoarded birth control, infertility, tied tubes, etc). And they're the ones with the most power!

I really enjoyed this, a nice addition to my dystopian shelf. The premise is the usual, a virus wipes out 99% of the worlds population and things are bad and people are mean and men are stupid. What I really loved about this was the protagonist, the unnamed midwife (Karen, Dusty, Jane or whatever), I loved the wit and her outlook on life that comes across in her journal entries. It's not perfect by any means but there is enough quirks and differences to make it stand out. This is the first book of 3, I will read the next one but this stands on its own really well.

By the end of this I just felt an overwhelming sense of....eh?

So the start of the book makes a deal of this being a journal, but then within a few paragraphs just changes to a normal third person past perspective so seemed pointless.

There was very little likeable about the main character apart from the fact she wanted to help the few women she came across with birth control.

I did like the whole apocalyptic setting and some of the interactions with people she met but it didn't save the book for me.

It just didn't do a great deal so I'm not really understanding the rave reviews and awards.

Mesmerizing, original, deeply dark. If the Handmaid's Tale was too neat and tidy for you, this is your book.

Enjoyed this. Well as much as you can enjoy the road and handmaid's tale

When I started reading this book I had that feeling of deja-vu and post apocalypse fatigue but within a very short time it was clear that there is something different about it that separates it from the rest. This is down to the point of view the book is written from. Not only is the main character a woman, which we've seen before, but the entire lens that the book is read through is from the female perspective. I have read many books where the fact that the main character is a woman only affects the pronouns used and other than that could be applied to any other ‘walking dead' scenario but this was a real study of what it would mean to be a woman in an uncivilised world. I really recommend it.