What if The Handmaid’s Tale took place in a separatist cult, ensconced on an island? That’s exactly what I think went through Ms. Melamed’s head while coming up with this novel. Gather the Daughters is a haunting tale of a society where women are controlled but children are free, and a young woman on the cusp of that transition discovers something that pulls her ideological foundations out from under her. It’s perhaps not for the faint of heart, but will definitely appeal to  fans of engrossing dystopian fiction that lingers in the memory.

The nuances of the world the author has created are unravelled in rich and layered prose, and I am reluctant to spoil its discovery for potential readers. So while this review is not full of spoilers, I am at the same time hesitant to go into too much detail. But here are the things I think you should know before diving in.

Many years earlier, the world was tipping over into becoming a barren wasteland due to war, famine, apocalypse - your standard fare for dystopian set-ups. Taking a note from M. Night Shyamalan's The Village, ten men gathered their families and set out for a island off the coast of their country. Setting up their own religion, government, and way of life, the men crafted a society where the only purpose served by women was to bear and rear children. Breeding became carefully controlled; matches between men and women were political and did not always take familial genetic relationships into account. Contact with the outside world was only allowed through the founding fathers, who left the island for supplies on occasion and came back with tales to justify their fiefdom.

This is likely to sound particularly familiar to fans of dystopian fiction. (Notice how dystopian writers tend to talk about subjugation and control of fertility and women’s bodies as markers of totalitarianism? But this is a book review, not a symposium, so I’ll step off my soap box now…) What is different about this particular world is that children are allowed to take summers off from living in society and being civilised. They run feral and free on the beaches of the island, having the most wild of rumpuses. Boys continue the cycle until they are ready to marry, but for girls, this freedom is abruptly cut off at the first sign of puberty. At that point, they are married off and shoved into back corners to breed as quickly and frequently as possible.

The catalyst for this story is the catalyst for change. As in so many of these books, a young girl sees something she shouldn’t and is forced to make decisions. Can she be who she’s been raised to be? Or should she listen to her inner voices telling her that something is very wrong and the world as it has been presented to her is very broken?

I read Gather the Daughters in one sitting, veritably inhaling it as I casually let my household chores pile around me and my phone go unanswered. It has been a while since a novel wove itself around me so completely, not necessarily because it was suspenseful - although it was - but because it so thoroughly transported me to its world.

As I said in the introduction, this book is not for the faint of heart. It’s not graphic by any means, but there is no romance here. The moments of joy are hard fought and fleeting and I’d argue pretty vociferously that none of the sex in this book is truly consensual. It’s a novel that makes you thankful for independent thought, for ancestors before us who chose to engage with difference instead of run from it, for those around us who open homes and tables and create love instead of fear. It’s also beautifully crafted and eminently haunting. If you’re a fan of dystopian works at all, I beg you to consider Gather the Daughters for your next read. I don’t believe you’ll regret it.

Buy Now: A/BN/iB/K

Great story. Very reminiscent of M. Night Shyamalan's movie "The Village" and "Lord of the Flies". I loved that the author didn't compromise the story by giving it a happy ending or by explaining where the family goes after they leave the island.

Although the book has an interesting premise, I had a hard time getting into it. The characters just didn't feel real. Since I did not finish the book, I do not intend to publish a review.

Gather the Daughters is an exceptionally original story. The characters are well developed and instantly identifiable. Jennie Melamed has writing a beautiful, thought provoking story that will remain with me for a long time. I highly recommend Gather the Daughters

Cults: one of my favorite subjects. As a bonus, a main focus was the role of women in a patriarchal society. This book was gripping and f'd up and I really enjoyed the read.

Free copy from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

They wanted to create a perfect society where the men would rule and the women would produce the children. This close-knit community had a simple lifestyle, where they would set up their own rules and expand on these rules whenever they needed. As the children began to have their own families, the parents were no longer needed and they simply slipped away as that was one of the rules set forth. Every couple was allowed two children, males being the preferred sex but females were needed for this society to flourish. As the girls reach their summer of fruition, finding a husband would soon be on their minds. It became a cycle, no one differentiated from the norm and no one questioned the system, it just worked. That was until now.

The more that I read, the more fascinated I became with these individuals and their lifestyles. The islands shall-nots have been passed down through the generations and these four girls started to question them. They wanted change. They saw what was happening on this island to themselves and others and they wanted something different. They had questions and yet no one wanted to hear them. I loved their curiosity, the fight that they had within them and the strength they had to continue to fight when faced with such dreadful conditions. They were willing to lose everything they had for their cause. They were curious about the world outside their island, they wanted the abuse of the females to come to an end and as the girls come together, they see what type of people the wanderers are and they try to share this with the village. Their determination made other girls aware of the situation and it bonded these females together. They were fighting for a cause, they had hope and you could feel the love in the words as they fought together for change. As I turned every page, I was pulling for these girls, for what they went through, I can’t imagine walking in their shoes. A novel with excellent tempo and anticipation and great emotions. It was definitely a page-turner novel for me. 4.5 stars

I received a copy of this novel from NetGalley and Little,Brown and Company in exchange for an honest review.

I read this book in less than 24 hours. I absolutely loved it. Being dubbed as a mix of The Giver and A Handmaid's Tale, I knew I had to request this from Netgalley. I wasn't disappointed. Told from the viewpoint of several teenage girls, we learn about life on the island and the constraints placed on women. Be prepared for a great story, strong characters, and an ending to die for!

I couldn't read this book it was way to dark and not at all what I like to read

outstanding world building, provocative exploration of gender issues, indelible characters that really pulled me in and broke my heart. more like handmaid's tale than hunger games, in terms of dystopian flavor as well as literary achievement

Still catching my breath, weeks after reading Gather The Daughters by Jennie Melamed. Let’s just talk about the gorgeous writing, the sentences that created this cult-like nightmare world. If you like creepy then this is for you.

Years ago, ten men colonized an island off the coats of a crumbling nation. There they built a society based on ancestor worship, controlled breeding, and the rationing of knowledge and history. Generations later, the community continues to follow their vision, and only the wanderers- chosen male descendants of the original ten- are allowed to leave the island. The daughters of these men have a strictly ordained future. At the first sign of puberty, they face their summer of fruition, a ritualistic season that catapults them from adolescence to matrimony. When their children have children, and they are no longer useful, they take their final draft and die. But in the summer, children reign supreme. With adults indoors and the pubescent in fruition, the young run wild, fighting over food and shelter, free of their fathers' hands and their mothers' despair. And it is at the end of one such summer that little Caitlin Jacob sees something so strange, so horrifying, that she must share it with the others- prompting born rebel Janey Solomon to step forward and seek the truth. At seventeen years old, Janey is slowly starving herself to death to avoid womanhood. Trying urgently to unravel the mysteries of the island and what lies beyond, she leads the girls in an uprising that may be their salvation, or their undoing.- From the cover


This book is very dystopian. The girl children happily live in a dark and brooding world, almost unaware of their future. Their future changes when Janey steps forward. This book is hard to read. The farther into the beginning you read, the more the bleakness of the dystopian world settles in. Then, like Janey, you see a light. The shimmer of possibility brings hope. The book was really well written and the characters were all amazing, especially for children. The girls were stubborn, smart, adaptive and amazing. While this book may seem anti-feminist on the surface, I felt a strong tug of feminism just below the current. I enjoyed this book, even though it was out of my normal book reading.

Scheduled for 7/26/17

Once there was a young wife who was making her first ham dinner. She carefully sliced the end off of the ham before putting it into the roasting pan.

Her husband queried, "Why did you cut the end of the ham off?"

"Because," the wife replied, "that's how Mom always did it."

The husband suggested, "You should ask your mom why."

So, when her folks arrived for dinner the young wife asked, "Mom, why do you cut the end of the ham off?" "Because," the mother replied, " otherwise it wouldn't fit into my roasting pan."

We are sometimes slaves to tradition, chanting 'it's always been done that way.' We do not consider the reasons behind received wisdom and the custom of the country. When tradition has the church or government behind it, there is even less reason to question its validity.

Once in a while, a rare mind arises that sees another possibility, a higher moral order; someone sensitive to the lives of individuals caught in a crushing system. They preach, they lead, they stand up against the system, and engender a new vision of how things can be.

First, someone has to question why we do things the way we do.


Presented for your consideration:

An island with a small separatist society, refugees from a violent world consumed by war and fire.

They have inherited a faith and laws from their founders. Like other tribal societies, their strict rules make their survival possible. There shall be no more than two children per family. When adults become superfluous they drink the potion. Dutiful wives and daughters are the foundation of society. Wives must submit to their husband, daughters their father.

The daughters hate their lives. They dream of escaping their father's caresses, the early marriages, the horror of childbirth too often resulting in 'bleeding out' or delivering a mutant child. They wish they could enjoy their childhood summers of wild freedom forever.

One girl resists, inciting a rebellion and setting off a chain of events that brings retribution and reveals horrifying secrets.

Gather the Daughters by Jennie Melamed is a hard novel to read. The cult is so despicable and perverse, I was conflicted by what I was reading and physically felt stressed. The author is a psychiatric nurse practitioner specializing in traumatized children and child sexual abuse. She knows what she is portraying in the novel. And she does it very well.

The novel was also compelling, with sympathetic characters and enough mystery to keep me turning pages. Without graphic descriptions, the author subtly implies the girl's hated realities.

When I finished I asked what did the novel offer to redeem the horror I felt as reading? Why would someone read this book? What can it teach me?

And I remembered the sermon illustration I'd heard long ago about the ham and the daughter imitating without understanding.

This dystopian novel is a warning.

Everything we do because it's the way people do things can be reconsidered. The Protestant Reformation, the American Revolution, votes for women, Civil Rights--these movements all arose because a few people questioned and challenged the established order.

But also we should consider the 'little' things we do. How we spend our time or our money. We buy a product without considering its human cost or environmental impact. We allow advertising to drive our purchase choices.

I won't soon forget these brave daughters willing to fight for dignity and wholeness. May they inspire us all.

Jennie Melamed lives with two Shiba Inus. I approve. I have two Shiba Inus myself.

I received a free book from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

A gripping read. A subject I hadn't read before. Very good.

While I won't deny that this book was well written, I found the subject matter at hand very disturbing. Others with a stronger constitution may be able to appreciate it for its psychological exploration of abuse victims, but I'm going to take a hard pass on this one.
(Full review on my blog)

3.5 stars
I love a cult! The psychology of it all fascinates me, so I had to request this book.
Melamed offers a horrifying look into a society shut off from the rest of the world. What has happened to the rest of humanity? How much do the adults of the island know?
Girls and women are treated horrendously in this small rustic community. The female inhabitants are used and abused by their families for 'their own good'. They get summers away from their suffering where it all gets a bit Lord of the Flies, but otherwise their bodies are completely controlled.
Overall a really interesting premise, a disturbing slow-burner of a novel; but didn't quite deliver at the end.

When the country became a wasteland, several men and their families colonized a coastal island where they built a fundamentalist society based on worshipping ancestors, controlling breeding, and restricting all knowledge of prior history of the unknown wastelands. Only the Wanderers or chosen male descendants of the original ten families are allowed to enter the still burning wastelands to scavenge for debris.

In this patriarchal dystopian society, as soon as a daughter reaches puberty or "fruition", her sole purpose becomes breeding. Daughters do not want to give birth to daughters so they will not have to endure the incestuous abuse they themselves endured until their first bleeding. When a daughter's children begins to have children, both parents are no longer deemed useful and are forced to drink the draught that will end their lives making room for future generations.

The story is told through the differing perspectives of four daughters: Vanessa, Amanda, Caitlyn, and Janey.

Vanessa is 13 years old and has an unquenchable thirst for knowledge about any tidbit of information beyond the suppressive colony.
Amanda is not quite 15 and is married and pregnant. She has a mother who despises her and a father who loves her too much. Her only escape was to marry and get away from her family.
Caitlyn, a rare first-generation child from the wasteland, came to the island when she was just a baby. Her father is a drunk and a her mother is a meek wallflower.
Janey, a fiery red-haired 17 year old, does everything in her power not to become a woman. She doesn't eat much hoping to prolong her fruition and wants to seek the truth about what lies beyond the colony.

This book was so great, I read through the first half non-stop. Seeing the colony through each girls' eyes was very interesting as the history of the wastelands and the mystery surrounding the colony was slowly revealed in bits and snatches. Not one of the girls was entirely happy and felt as if she were missing something but couldn't identify what that missing component was. Just a deep yearning for freedom. This debut novel by Jennie Melamed was spellbinding and riveting! I rate this book 5 out of 5 stars.

Thank you NetGalley and Little, Brown and Company for providing a copy of this novel in exchange for a fair review. https://moesbookblog.wordpress.com/

Reviewed: February 26, 2017. Novel Publish Date: July 25, 2017.

I tried to like this book, but it relies too heavily on trite tropes of much recent post-apocalyptic fiction: a society that remakes itself to accommodate its own isolation and consequently tainted gene pool, keeping its women in the dark and giving men too much power, which they predictably misuse. Of course blood, puberty, and sexuality are warped and vilified in this world, and clearly something is about to give, but I did not stick around to see what it was.

Felt like I was holding my breath the entire time...I love when a book makes me feel that way!

Haunting and harrowing this book seems to hit that sweet spot that is so hard to achieve. Completely captivating and reminiscent at times of Room and Station Eleven. It is without doubt beautifully written, it's success lies almost
in what it doesn't tell you as it quietly and poetically unfurls the horrors of island life whilst always holding something back, allowing the readers imagination to take that final painful step into the world these girls occupy.

Thank you to the Publisher and to NetGalley for the advance copy. I loved this book and highly recommend it.

“This dream, the dark embodiment of blasphemy, is a shameful secret rooted strongly as a tooth or a fingernail.”

Still catching my breath, weeks after reading Gather The Daughters by Jennie Melamed. Let’s just talk about the gorgeous writing, the sentences that created this cult-like nightmare world. This is how a writer should reveal the inner turmoil, from describing mutton that tastes like dirt and yet father eats with gusto, to one child hating the marks on her body and how they give her inner secrets, shame away. There is no need to spell out anything here, it is bubbling all the time on the surface, it’s deadly hands are coming up out of the dirt and grabbing at the children. This novel is downright disturbing and I don’t pretend to know an author’s intentions, we read what will and let them play in our minds differently, we ponder the things that are said as much as unsaid. No one ever reads the same book! This can simply be a disturbing cult, stuck at the end of the world on an island, cut off from the so-called wastelands, it can just be adults full of lies creating a utopia that benefits men alone, or you can scratch at the surface and see the abuse in the very world you live in now.

We are, all of us, little cults- aren’t we? If you really open your mind and think of your culture, country, city, family, circles then you can see it- those things that make us separate from the ‘wastelands’ in our own lives, the rules we create for the ‘better’ of our loved ones. The things we chose to believe, whether we act out on the account of religious beliefs or against believing in anything at all, we are still creating boundaries, truths, paths. I thought about the sickening world these girls, these daughters are gathered in (rounded up more like) and how they feel the wrongness at their core, even when suppressing their rage, it’s still there, even if it is in the form of fear. I pondered on the blind acceptance of the grown women, ‘oh well, it’s just the way things are.’ What is the purpose of the pungent drink mothers give their little girls? How could a mother be complicit, and what does it mean when you grow up in a world where it is expected, normal? Isn’t it always this way, maybe not as extreme- still… What is expected of women, what we’re meant to shuck in becoming mothers, or adults in this world, may not be as brutal and rotten as in this novel but there are parallels, my friends.

I am not trying to be harsh on humanity, certainly parents must guide their children, certainly we can’t throw up our hands and believe in nothing, nor let the children run around as a feral creature, we have to exist in society don’t we? Even if you escape humanity and live off the grid, there are still rules to teach your children for survival. But there is living and there is blind acceptance. In Gather The Girls, bad things seem to happen the girls, women who do not accept the way, the ones who dare to question or look to the horizon for something different. What a brutal place! I tasted Lord Of The Flies in the children’s summers, dare I say I enjoyed far better the descriptions by Melamed as the children of her creation turn feral? Absolutely, that’s how gorgeous her writing is! What is going on here? What is this place? Is the rest of the world just a burning wasteland, if so- where in the hell do these newcomers hail from? Why do they have different clothing and shoes? Why won’t they talk of the outside world, much as the wanderers that salvage things from the wastelands won’t?

The daughters, all the poor daughters suffer and it’s a disgusting act that is a father’s right, with girls so young. First you belong to daddy, then one wild season of frolicking, exploring your sexuality, then you better match yourself up with a man that you will now belong to, have a family, there is no freedom there is no choice. Then when you are no longer of use to the island and it’s people, you drink a draught and die selflessly, so others may take your place. Make room for the young! “She loved him until they blew out the lanterns, and then she wanted to creep away on her belly like something boneless and primitive.”

There could days of discussions over this haunting novel. While most of our lives aren’t as torturous and full of abuse, the longing for running wild, climbing trees, rather than acting like a ‘proper woman’ isn’t lost on any of us. Who doesn’t want to taste the rain and enjoy the wildness of childhood? Shucking off freedom, behaving appropriately, accepting your due is a death unto itself we all go through. Luckily we have choices, at least the illusion of it. Our world can have limits we are blind to, much in the same way the people of this particular island follow in the footsteps of their forefathers. It’s not easy to see the wrongness of your world if you can never leave it, if there isn’t anything different to compare it to. I am reminded of those of us that travel, how we never come back the same, nothing has changed in our old haunts, our perception is altered. Mind you, one needn’t travel to other countries, look around you- the world is connected now and ignorance is never an excuse. God bless the misfits, the outcasts, those who deviate from the norm because through them we question everything we accept as truth, through them we can see past our smallness in this vast universe, and maybe question the self-appointed dictators in our lives. Gather The Daughters has it’s own fiery haired misfit, Janey- who fights even nature to escape the ways of her people.

This novel is so good, and I wish I could write about the girls more but I hate ruining the pleasure for others. I am curious to probe others thoughts and opinions on this. I think I’ll be forcing it on a few friends so we can chew on one another’s insights. Oh my gosh, yes- read it. I went through so many emotions, anger, disgust, hope, excitement, and the end- the ending… oh…. Gorgeous summer reading!

Publication Date: July 25, 2017

Little, Brown and Company