A fictional response to a real life event – Women Talking
Women Talking – the blurb
In a remote Mennonite colony, over a hundred girls and women were knocked unconscious and violated-by what many thought were ghosts or demons-as punishment for their sins. Their accounts were chalked up to ‘wild female imagination.’
Women Talking is an imagined response to these real events. When the women learn that they were in fact drugged and attacked by men in their community, they hold a secret meeting in a hayloft. They have two days to make a plan before the rapists are bailed out and brought home: will they dare to escape?
Should they stay or should they go?
I know very little about the Mennonite community and had to Google where abouts they were located and when. The book gave very little clue as to what era we were reading about, not that it necessarily mattered. What did matter was the horrific, real life tragedy that had befallen these women. Rather than overly dwell on the event Toews hinted and snuck little facts in as cast away sentences. Instead the focus was on the women deliberating whether they should leave before the men returned or whether they should stay.
It’s only 200 pages yet somehow very wordy. I think it was because of all the deliberation which I did find slightly indulgent at times. There was very little plot and pondering over whether women were animals did become slightly tedious. I also struggled with what I thought were inconsistencies in the book. The women knew about metaphors yet didn’t know how to read or write? That being said the fact that these were real women kept hitting home and I found the end strangely hopeful. There is now a film and it would be interesting to see how Hollywood has interpreted it.
