Staff Pick
Miriam Toews gives us her fictional rendering of the hundreds of real rapes that occurred in the Bolivian Mennonite community between 2005 and 2009. The rapes were attributed to ghost demons, but in actuality, a group of male members of the community sprayed animal anesthesia in the bedroom windows of their intended victims, climbed through the windows, and raped the women and girls. While the crimes have already been committed at the start of this novel, the fallout is in full force. The women of the community are meeting in secret to establish what their response will be to the crimes against them. The text is presented as the minutes of the meeting the women hold, recorded by a sympathetic man, because the women can neither read nor write. While the entirety of the book is, indeed, women talking, it is a shocking excavation that peels back layers of shame, indoctrination, loss of free will, ignorance, and misogyny. Perhaps only someone who has escaped a deeply religious communal life, as Toews did, can illustrate so clearly the oppression the women endure. With no money, nowhere to go, no knowledge of the world beyond their community, and not even the ability to speak the native language, the women are terrified, but they are enraged as well. By turns harrowing, poignant, heartbreaking, and hopeful, Women Talking is the bittersweet awakening of women to their own power. Recommended By Dianah H., Powells.com