betty reviewed A Brother's Price by Wen Spencer
Review of "A Brother's Price" on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
Kind of like if [b:The Handmaid's Tale|38447|The Handmaid's Tale|Margaret Atwood|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1255648830s/38447.jpg|1119185] were a romantic comedy.
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Sorry, I had to whack myself in the face with the keyboard several times to reset my noggin after typing that.
Right, so, it's basically "what if The Patriarchy(tm) was The Matriarchy!?" which veers wildly between "See, see how gender oppression is unfair?" and "Lol, schadenfreude!" which works as comedy only on the assumption that the oppression depicted against men is totally implausible in any real world.
Spencer imagines a world in which men are so rare that women (usually sisters) must band together and save up to afford a husband, and then to defend him against husband raiders. The two great dangers to men are being kidnapped, and STDs: since husbands are shared, families share a keen interest in everyone's sexual continence.
Jerin, our protagonist, gets embroiled in politics, and is wooed by the …
Kind of like if [b:The Handmaid's Tale|38447|The Handmaid's Tale|Margaret Atwood|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1255648830s/38447.jpg|1119185] were a romantic comedy.
asj;dfaskdjf;jjkllkjlklll
Sorry, I had to whack myself in the face with the keyboard several times to reset my noggin after typing that.
Right, so, it's basically "what if The Patriarchy(tm) was The Matriarchy!?" which veers wildly between "See, see how gender oppression is unfair?" and "Lol, schadenfreude!" which works as comedy only on the assumption that the oppression depicted against men is totally implausible in any real world.
Spencer imagines a world in which men are so rare that women (usually sisters) must band together and save up to afford a husband, and then to defend him against husband raiders. The two great dangers to men are being kidnapped, and STDs: since husbands are shared, families share a keen interest in everyone's sexual continence.
Jerin, our protagonist, gets embroiled in politics, and is wooed by the royal princesses, who are in the market for a husband. It's not giving anything away to tell you eventually he falls for all the sisters, and vice versa; this is pretty strongly signalled from the beginning.
Jerin is not a revolutionary, trying to overthrow gender oppression in his world. He occasionally finds some of the restrictions placed on him unfair, but in general is only trying to find happiness within the system; so, a lot like the other 99% of romance novels, really.
This is the book where I eventually realized (very, very belatedly) that one of Spencer's keen interests is how families organize themselves for reproduction. Off the top of my head, she has written families that are polygynous, a girl raised by her grandfather, but conceived by her dead father's sperm donation, a lesbian family which made use of technology to have children without a sperm donor, and a family made up of a clone, his son-self, and an adopted genetically engineered brother.
