Dystopian ‘Daughters’ doesn’t gather its vigor
Faded story doesn’t hold a candle to ‘Handmaid’s Tale’
Dystopian stories about women are all the rage right now, thanks to Hulu.
While Gather the Daughters (Little, Brown, 352 pp., eeEE) clearly was in the works long before the series based on Canadian author Margaret Atwood’s classic novel The
Handmaid’s Tale made the country gaga over Gilead, it’s riding the wave of the show’s popularity.
But it wipes out. Daughters is derivative at best and a faded photocopy at worst.
Jennie Melamed’s debut novel is about a religious commune cloistered on an island that was settled generations earlier by 10 male founders who escaped what the commune calls “the wastelands.”
The commune eschews modern technology and conveniences, though the wanderers, a handful of men who travel by ferry back to the larger world, occasionally return with mementos, such as a book called Cubist
Picasso, and medicine. For the island dwellers, life is a biblical horror show set amid a violent patriarchal society that uses a calendar tied to agricultural rites for obscure reasons and enforces super-strict sex rules.
The boudoir mores are hardly by the book — the Good one or otherwise. They include incest, orgies, what amounts to forced marriages and treating women as baby-making machines.
The island’s children get a reprieve every summer, when they run wild outdoors 24/7. For the young girls who lend their rotating points of views to each chapter, the warm weather becomes bittersweet as they get closer to adolescence, the time when they must find husbands. Those that get too uppity face harsh punishments.
Occasionally, converts move to the island — an effort to refresh the gene pool from all the inbreeding. The newcomers have strict instructions not to discuss their old lives in the wastelands, but sometimes, tidbits leak out, opening naïve eyes to the fact that young girls shouldn’t be sleeping with their fathers.
There are some glimmers of hope, like the bonds of female friendship and the young women’s desire to feed their natural human instincts for justice. However, those are offset by a cold view of miscarriages, or defectives; a brutal whipping scene; and a morbid “Ring Around the Rosie” reboot: “One-two-threefour-five-six-seven/Drink a draft and go to heaven/Grandmother can’t. Grandmother won’t/Push that poison down her throat!”
When one young girl sees something she shouldn’t — a violent act perpetrated by, you guessed it, men — life on the island goes to hell.
The fact that the author is a psychiatric nurse practitioner who specializes in working with traumatized children makes
Daughters disturbing. But Melamed’s plot suggests some real storytelling chops. Crafting a new society with its own bizarre rules is a big undertaking and the writing is fast-paced. You get a feel for what the girls face and how they strain against the island dogma to find their own voices and freedom. Whether they succeed, Melamed never tells us.