https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/55585992

For those who didn't follow it, there was a huge uproar among TRAs about this book when it came out this month. In the story, all the men and boys in the world disappear, including TIMs and male enbies. The author is a good girl and says that this was horribly unfair, but then goes on to develop the story in a way that passively indicates TIMs have their share of responsibility for the world created by men.

Spoilers ahead. I'll black them out as needed.

Newman has taken on a subject that has been handled very well in the past by sci fi greats like Sheri S. Tepper, Suzy McKee Charnas and Joanna Russ. After reading 'The Men,' I strongly suggest going out and getting Tepper's 'The Gate to Women's Country,' Charnas's 'Holdfast Chronicles' or Russ's 'The Female Man.' 'The Men' is just ok. It's not bad, but it doesn't break any new ground and I am pretty sure that a month from now, I won't remember it. Newman lacks the world-building skill/talent of these other authors, who left no blurry spots or fudgy corners in their worldscapes. As a result, her hypothetical world can feel unsatisfyingly like an impressionist painting.

Newman admitted to being a Tepper fan in her acknowledgments. Possibly as a result of that, she tried to split the story between a lot of points of view. Tepper can pull this off--aside from George Elliott, she is the only author I've ever read who can hold my attention through a hundred pages of preamble and character establishment. It doesn't work here because there simply isn't enough story or enough layers to the story to spread out between the different characters. In the end, you're left frustrated by the characters and storylines that were simply dropped because the author was ready to wrap up the major plotlines and had run out of time. This is especially unfortunate because Newman's greatest strength seems to be drawing interesting, believable characters.

I'm more satisfied with the ending than I have heard other readers are, because I feel like it illustrates well how colonized women's minds are when it comes to men--that even when we find ourselves in a world we find vastly preferable to the one men made, we still reach back toward the men. This, I thought, was done well through the first person character, Jane, who was the most fully realized in the book.

Like many modern books, 'The Men' suffers from jump-ahead-itis. Instead of being shown things as they evolve, we are just told that a big shift occurred, and it can feel inorganic. The romantic relationship between Jane and Evangelyne, for example, could have been built up to in a way that would make the reader believe in and care about it more. Unless we weren't supposed to--I guess there's a chance the author meant to show her protagonist as a clinging vine who, now that men were gone, would inevitably fall into a wife-type role with a strong, charismatic, high-status woman.

Putting the disappearance of the men down to the opening of a demon dimension by women setting themselves on fire was an unsatisfying decision, in my opinion. Too many questions left unanswered. Why was it possible for mentally-unstable women to open a demon dimension? What were the demons? What did they want? It wasn't fair to set up something as weird as the streaming video of the men with the Hieronymus Bosch animals capering around them without offering a complete explanation of where the videos came from, who made them, why the animals, why the sequence of events shown on the videos, what was the point of just the watchers' men escaping death, since apparently everything went back to the way it was the moment the men and boys disappeared (this was annoying, and very much like the old 'it was all a dream' gambit).

There was some beautiful writing, and the descriptions of the weird land the men were trapped in were vivid and quite beautiful, but in the end, it did not add up to a fully-baked cake for me. Though I don't want to warn anyone off it, I also wouldn't outright recommend it.

I'd be interested to hear what others thought!