Motherlines

Suzy McKee Charnas

Completed 6/28/2020, Reviewed 6/28/2020

3 stars

I had heard better things about this book than the first in the series, Walk to the End of the World.  It’s certainly different in how it’s written and it’s about a women’s dystopia rather than that of men.  But I felt it suffered from several issues, most notably, a boring plot.  It follows the character Alldera from the first book as she discovers tribes of women and free fems out beyond the Wild.  The world building is pretty great and the prose is generally decent.  However, I just couldn’t get involved with the characters, much like the first book.  Even though Alldera was in the focus of the book, I couldn’t identify with her.  Nonetheless, this is the second book of the Holdcraft Chronicles which is in the Gaylactic Spectrum Hall of Fame and a Sideways retro award winner. 

Alldera, the fem slave from the first book, runs away from Holdfast as it plunges into civil war.  She makes her way through the Wild searching for the tribe of escaped fems that are purported to be somewhere out west.  She finds herself pregnant by one of her captors who raped her as she bravely makes her way alone in the wilderness.  She spies monsters, two-headed four-legged creatures that pursue her.  She discovers they are women on horses.  They bring her back to their tribe to nurse her back to health and help her deliver her child.  She is told the women are descendants of a group of women who were genetically modified to be able to bear children without men.  But when Alldera discovers how the pregnancies are activated, she runs off to the find the free fems.  They, however, are quite dysfunctional, almost recreating the negative, unhealthy environment that they escaped from.  Alldera has no choice but to try to reconcile the two tribes and try to bring out the best between them.

One of the biggest problems with the first book was the exposition.  This book doesn’t have quite the same problem.  It introduces the two cultures a little more organically.  Only a few times does story devolve into info dumping.  Still, I could not get immersed in the story.  I could never see where the book wanted to take me until the very end.  It was more slice of life rather than a strongly plotted story. 

Another problem was the characterization.  I didn’t care for any of the characters.  Some were benevolent, some were mean, but they all felt very two-dimensional.  And even though the story was told in third person mostly from the point of view Alldera, I didn’t feel like she was fleshed out.  It seemed she had no emotions, as if she were disaffected.  Granted, she was on guard through much of the beginning of the book, as you’d expect from someone who suffered intense abuse and then was put into a somewhat healthier environment.  But she never comes out of it.  She grows attached to some of the women she has sexual relationships with, but even that didn’t draw me in. 

I give the book three stars out of five.  Like the first book, the world-building was phenomenal.  I thought Charnas’ creation of two dystopias and trying to make a utopia out of their combination was great.  The prose was also good, with lush descriptions of a harsh plains environment.  I just couldn’t care enough about the main character or any of the other secondary characters.  Like Alldera, I almost felt a disassociation with book.  Sticking with it was tough, even though I had long sessions with it.  But, this is considered a classic of feminist lesbian science fiction, and I’m glad I read it.  However, I’m probably not going to read the rest of the series, which Charnas finally completed thirty years after these first two books were published.