3.5 stars.

A rustic community on an isolated island: a simple society of farmers, wood-carvers and roofers. The men labour in the fields while the women bring forth children and keep the home; as a woman, one submits first to one's father and then one's husband; and, when one's children have had children and one's usefulness is outlived, one takes the fatal draught. Nobody questions the laws of the ancestors. It was doubt and sin, after all, which led to the great fire which has ravaged the old world, which is now nothing but a parched wasteland where none but the wanderers may go. Things are as they have always been - as they should be. But, for a group of girls teetering on the brink of womanhood, a dangerous question hovers in the air. Who makes the laws? And what truly lies beyond the island?

The island has its own way of working, something that Melamed unveils gradually through the first few chapters of her novel. The customs dawn on you slowly, unpleasantly, as you understand the way this 'idyll' has been created by and for the satisfaction of men. Girls are bound into a schedule of growth, fruition, marriage and childbearing that allows no flexibility, no compassion and no relief. The only freedom they enjoy are the wild summers of their childhoods, when the adults let the prepubescent children run through the woods and fields in the long, hot days, to work off the wild exhilaration of the year. But, to borrow a phrase, summer's lease hath all too short a date, and all girls know that their time is limited. Soon they will flower, their bleeding will begin and then another kind of summer awaits them - prescribed, inescapable, and the beginning of the end.

It's a well-crafted book in which horror sidles its way into your line of sight, and Melamed has a deft way of building tension that leaves your nerves shimmering. And then there's the lingering question of genre. When I began reading this, I assumed it was science fiction. Now I'm not so sure. It could, alarmingly, be contemporary fiction. What's certain is that it's worth a read: a sobering indictment of how there is no such thing as an objectively 'ideal' world, for one man's dream is another (wo)man's nightmare.

The full review will be published on 11 July 2017 at the following link:
https://theidlewoman.net/2017/07/11/gather-the-daughters-jennie-melamed

After a cataclysmic event destroyed the country as we know it, a secluded community with its own rules survives in Jennie Melamed's Gather the Daughters, but the daughters begin to question the rules dictating their lives.

In a community descended from ten ancestor families, whom the community now worships, daughters are trained at an early age by their fathers how to be a good wife. On the island, the population is kept safe by not leaving and having no knowledge of the world beyond their shores, apart from what little their worship book and the Wanderers tell them. Several daughters who have yet to reach puberty, when they'll go through their summer of fruition and find a husband, begin to question if there's anything or anyone beyond their island and if they can have a life as anything other than a wife and mother.

There was a lot about the premise of this story that was intriguing, yet it was also utterly frightening in the possibility of this actually happening and disturbing in what it both overtly and obliquely portrayed. While I was disgusted at how the women and girls seemed to accept the men's behavior as normal, I also couldn't stop reading to see who might be able to change things and how they might accomplish it. The type of societal structure in the community left women oppressed and submissive, but there were at least some of the young girls who asserted their agency, offering a modicum of an optimistic outlook for the characters (and readers); however, I was disappointed in the character whose actions bring the narrative to its conclusion--it just felt like a let down that while much was changing for this particular family, nothing significant seems to have actually changed.
Overall, I'd give it a 3.5 out of 5 stars.

This book had me at cult. Seriously, I clicked the request button on Netgalley the second I read that word. I'm fascinated by psychology, especially the deviant sort and subsequently all things to do with cults. And this cult in particular was a doozie. How would something like that even be marketed? PeadoParadise? Now, that's just wrong, isn't it, to treat something as terrible as child abuse facetiously. And yet, the mind goes there, imagining the sort of individuals, referred to as ancestors in the book, who would want to create such a place. Island community, inhospitable climate, low quality of life, exceptionally low life expectancy (as in put to pasture once one outlives their use, usually by 40), but there is socially acceptable rampant incest and child abuse. Nightmarish, isn't it? Also not really a thing to do with comparison titles used to lure the reader in. Talk about an advertising misfire. I understand the concept behind that strategy, especially when promoting debuts, but also it's lazy, generic and creates unfounded expectations. This book worked all too well in its own right. Genuinely frightening, increasingly so in a claustrophobic hopeless sort of way, especially toward the end. The author knows her subject well having studied and researched the psychological affects of child abuse and, judging by this most auspicious debut, she's also a very talented writer. This book is as difficult to read as it is impossible to put down. It raises all sort of questions. Questions that can even be applied on a larger scale. Can a society actually function by means of oppression? If the norm is too horrid to live with, what does it take to question it? Must the socially acceptable standard be unanimously socially accepted when the conscience rages against it? The daughters of the island have had enough, but finding the strength to rebel in a patriarchal structure where they passed from father (childhood to puberty) to spouse (puberty to their children's puberty) to grave (their children married off, no longer of use) is another matter. But surely that's just fiction, isn't it? In what world would women be treated worst than second rate citizens, more like a breeding stock/domestic aide, objectified, traded, punished, beaten, killed, raped? Of course not, whew, it was just a scary story. Pure fiction. Terrific fiction. Strongly recommended. Thanks Netgalley.

This is the second book with an end of the world scenario that puts women in a frightening and subjugating position they must fight to overcome that I have read recently, and it’s all the more frightening and too close to home with Donald Trump about to take office as president. While most of the country is scorched wasteland, an island just off the coast has a population of survivors. Years before 10 men and their families formed their own community, one where access to history and knowledge was closely guarded. Women are little better than cattle, marrying at puberty and reproducing until they are too old, and then put to sleep, like animals. A select group of men, descendants of the first 10 men are allowed into the former world, where they scavenge what they can. One day a young girl sees something that stands in direct contradiction to everything she has ever been taught. Jane Solomon, a 17-year-old who refuses to become a brood mare and is starving herself to death, hears the news and begins sowing the seeds for a revolution, an uprising of the daughters. Scary good