Started reading this as part of a book club with my mom, and I'm not a fan of it. Very anti-sex-work kinda stuff going on in the first chapter, and the choice for a white author to write a Mexican protagonist as not really understanding what's going on in the utopian future, stuck in a community with drugs and prostitution, etc is… not good. There's also some appropriation of Native American aesthetics — one of the characters in the future-utopia says that "Wamponaug Indians are the source of our culture" but as far as I can tell the author doesn't really mean anything specific by this, and the only thing it seems like she could really be referring to is a extremely generic description of a rite of passage that is definitely meant to evoke a sort of native-exoticism, but seems like something that was written from memories of stories that you heard from some guy at a party some time about some rite of passage of some tribe somewhere.

It also seems to be a extremely played-straight utopia. I'm crossing my fingers that there will be some kind of subversion of that but from what I've heard that's not likely.

Since it seems to be a played-straight utopia, that forces me to consider how I feel about the society it describes, and while there are undeniably good things about it, it seems more drawn from aesthetic ideas that environmentalists and feminists in the 60's had about what a good society might look like than from real consideration of the forces that shape the world — we're supposed to accept advanced technology when it's needed for the aesthetics (all babies being grown in-vitro, since that's a necessary prerequisite for equality between the sexes in the branch of feminism that Piercy comes from), without worrying about where that technology comes from in a society without large cities (necessary for the return-to-earth kind of environmentalism that Piercy advocates).

I guess I should also talk about the eugenics part of it — apparently in order to make this utopia, where all the babies are grown in-vitro, it was necessary to "mix the genes well through the population" to eliminate racial differences, or something? But don't worry, I guess we're supposed to think it's the good kind of eugenics, because they decided to "breed a high proportion of darker-skinned people" so it's anti-racist or something?

There's also a heavy focus on gender so far, and for a supposedly utopian book that focuses on gender, it sure stands out that there's no mention of transness at all. This could be kind of reasonable — I personally think that a egalitarian, largely agender society would be pretty utopian. But for me that falls flat when the author goes out of her way to talk about how they use some kind of gene-editing technology ()? to change their hair color at will — it stands out to me that there's no mention at all of ways of changing sex characteristics, especially given that that technology existed already when this book was written. It didn't surprise me much to learn that the author signed a TERF manifesto in 2013.

There's other stuff that bothers me too — there seems to be no real thought put into linguistics for a book that loves inventing new words — a common problem, to be sure, but I guess I was spoiled by reading The Dispossessed recently.

Anyway, not good, but I'm gonna finish it for this book club, I guess. "Excited" to see what else I'll find in here.