This was a fascinating book; I definitely recommend it if you’re looking for something like The Handmaid’s Tale (appropriate on this Women’s March weekend). Erdrich’s book is set in the near future, where instead of environmental catastrophe, mankind is facing a different threat: life has begun to evolve backwards, and no one can tell what the future of humanity might be. Based on the babies that have recently been born underdeveloped, the prognosis isn’t good.
Our narrator Cedar is a young woman, in her mid-twenties, who finds herself pregnant, and is writing this book as a diary to her unborn child. Because of the crisis, the government has become extremely unstable. A sort of martial law takes over and the government starts systematically rounding up all pregnant women. But Cedar decides to look up her birth parents so at least she’ll have some idea what her baby will be facing. Cedar, her adoptive parents, her birth mother, and the baby’s father all have to fight to keep the baby safe.
I found this to be a fast-moving read, and quite a different one from Erdrich’s other books, which are much more introspective. The dystopian theme is a departure for Erdrich, but it’s an interesting story with strong characters. There’s a lot of action, but at the same time Cedar has to grapple with her feelings about her newly discovered family and what that means for her relationship with her adoptive parents.
More interesting, Erdrich writes in the beginning of the book about Cedar and her liberal parents’ romanticizing of her Ojibwe background. She’s disappointed to find that her mother, Mary Potts, runs a gas station convenience store. I thought this was a really interesting way to begin the story. Cedar has to come to terms with her own heritage throughout this novel, and I would have liked to know even more about the Potts’ tribal life.
If there’s a downside to this book it’s that Erdrich doesn’t spend enough time grappling with the biological implications of her scenario. Cedar is fighting for the life of her baby even though there’s no telling how the baby will be born and the risk to her own health is enormous. Even her mother isn’t convinced she should carry the child to term.
As with a lot of dystopian fiction right now, this book feels disturbingly possible. I don’t know about the reverse evolution thing, but everything else seems like it could happen. The government using technology to spy on people, the heavy handed use of religion to control women’s reproduction, and a biological fertility crisis all seem not so very far away.
Challenges: this book meets categories in the Read Harder 2018 challenge (a science fiction novel with a female protagonist written by a female author) and Science Fiction v Fantasy Bingo (dystopia/ End of the World).
