Vox

Overall, this was well-done dystopian fiction. There are obviously some influences here from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here. The plot is pretty straightforward. The United States has elected numerous officials into office from a radical Christian bent who are intent upon restoring “traditional” gender roles in the United States and putting women in their place. While women are subordinated, all sexual deviants and “immoral” actors are consigned to what amount as prison/concentration camps. Whereas Atwood speculates that women might be forced into concubinage when the elite experience infertility, Dalcher imagines a world where technology has allowed men to restrict the ability for women to speak. Women become limited to 100 words per day, with a “shock collar” being affixed to their wrist that will punish them for transgressing this quota with a series of escalating electric shocks. With women unable to speak, read, or write, men now take over all aspects of public life.

The protagonist, a renowned female neurolinguist whose research focused on Wernicke’s aphasia, is drawn unwittingly into the underground resistance that seeks to overthrow this new order in the United States.

By and large, I thought the pacing, action, and plot were all well executed until the very end. I thought the last fifty pages or so were rushed and produced an oversimplified resolution to what I would argue is a very intriguing and complex dystopian world.

In the same vein as A handmaid's Tale, Vox is the story of a dystopian America where the female population is oppressed after a newly elected president and his cronies take steps to bring back the old days when women had no rights. Women are no longer allowed to work outside the home. They can still drive, and go to the grocery store, they can still care for their children, but they are allotted only 100 words per day and there is severe punishment should they speak more than that. They can not read, even instructions from their own doctors will be sealed in an envelope addressed to their husbands. Mail is also only for husbands. Children still attend school but with drastic differences for boys and girls. There is punishment for sex before marriage, and outside of marriage, and for being homosexual. As Jean tries to do what she can to raise her children under such circumstances, she becomes aware that there is an even more sinister plan in the works. With the current divisiveness in the states this was certainly a timely read.

4 out of 5 stars

I received an advance copy for review.