Some books are bad in a fun way, this book is bad in a boring way. unfortunately this was not for me at all and i struggled ti read this - did not finish

Watching the lives of the characters unfold in light of their backgrounds makes for a slow burn that escalates in mystery and intrigue.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing an ARC in exchange for an unbiased review.

Overall this book fell flat for me. I knew it was a bit controversial but in a rather pedestrian way nothing life changing or provocative at all.

DNF @ 10%

I gave this book a chance because I wanted to hear the author out and I had a free copy, but after a couple of chapters, it just wasn't good — especially compared to Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin, which also came out this year. It underestimates women and sucks the power out of an interesting premise right away. I'd skip this one.

Thank you NetGalley and Grove Atlantic for this ebook.

I paused at 25%. And wasn't feeling this. Continue until 30/35% and I just couldn't. I Dnfed this one. The idea of this sounded so interesting but it didnt work for me.

This book that maybe had ambitions of being ‘the next Station Eleven’ , but sadly ended up feeling flat and clunky. I didn’t realize until finishing this book, that it has been surrounded by controversy with questions of transphobia and it’s alleged TERF agenda. As a Cis woman, I definitely do not qualified to make statements on this, but I definitely felt that the ‘Y’ chromosome extinction story was just off in some way. I did feel what could have been an interesting premise in the right hands, ended up feeling shallow and lacking any nuance or complexity.

In one moment, everyone with a Y chromosome disappears, leaving women and trans men in a post apocalyptic wasteland. Except, rather quickly, it’s not so much of a wasteland. They band together without much violence to take care of each other and even start helping the climate crisis.

Some are happy in this new world. Others are devastated. And some are conflicted. When a mysterious video of the men in some sort of forest wasteland appears with weird animal like creatures surrounding them, many woman become obsessed looking for their loved ones. Where is the video coming from? Where are the men? Can we get them back? And what about this world that kinda seems better without them?

This book was wild! I’m still thinking about it and will be for sometime. I’m still not sure how I wanted it to end and if I’m satisfied with it, but it was definitely thought provoking. I enjoyed the complexity of the characters and their situations, because none of us are simple, and we’re all neither good nor bad and when faced with tough decisions, the way forward isn’t always clear.

Prior to its release there was a huge to-do about this book called "The Men" and its cover that has two big Xs on it, because delusional men who wish they were XX felt excluded or something and there's no such thing as a woman who can do anything right by these misogynists so whatever.

Essentially, on this one night in August, all the men (yes, even you, "transwomen") vanish in the night and there are weird videos of them doing weird stuff and suddenly women are the boss etc. and a bunch of people die and energy is difficult because STEM and people are sad, which, fair.

The problem is that this story has been told before and better. This would have been a huge nothing burger if it weren't for the manufactured outrage, and the ending...? A keen internet-er can find out what's up, but it was terrible and I hated it.

Not giving it 4 because it's not worth it, not giving it 2 because I don't want to contribute to the pile-on, so a 3-star review (which I actually think it fairly deserves) is where we're at.

I wanted to like this a lot more than I did. The narrative voices felt a bit uneven, and the implications were a tad underbaked. But I think that's sort of an issue of the genre itself: it's hard to fully map the consequences of something so catastrophic, and how -- beyond the gendered dynamics -- how it would instill a cruelty so deep in the survivors as to impart new hierarchies. Perhaps because I didn't expect the men's disappearance to take that fantastical a turn, I was also a bit turned off by that element of it.

First, to address the proverbial elephant in the room: The Men is a controversial book, one that is widely claimed to be transphobic. I wasn't aware of this when I requested an ARC -- I just wanted to get my hands on this because I loved Sandra Newman's novel The Country of Ice Cream Star; the things she did with language in that book were nothing short of brilliant. After having read The Men, I can tell you that I, personally, didn't find it to be transphobic (in fact the book, in both topic and execution, is incredibly liberal), but I do respectfully acknowledge that as a cis woman I'm not qualified to offer an opinion about an experience I have never had.

Outside of the controversy, here is my honest opinion about The Men: This is a weird and intriguing book -- one that is gorgeously-written, but that I'm not sure entirely works. What we have here is a genderpocalpyse story in which all people with a Y chromosome disappear in an instant, only to reappear in fantastical internet videos that have them wandering around mindlessly at first, then later committing heinous acts of violence. Meanwhile, the women are left behind to cope in an abruptly dystopian -- or perhaps utopian? -- society.

This isn't really a book about the disappearance of all Y-chromosome-having humans, though. This is instead a book about complex female relationships, racism, trauma, male violence and police violence, and power dynamics. Newman uses the disappearance as a jumping off point to discuss all of these relevant social issues, exploring them through a diverse cast of female characters with a vast spectrum of past and current experiences. It's a bit heavy-handed and slow-paced at times, but something about it kept me riveted. Newman's writing is hypnotic and sinuous and strong, her characters are so vivid and interesting, and the story she tells here is just so bizarre and captivating that I didn't want to stop reading to find out what happened next.

But then the ending happened. And no spoilers, but whoa, it did not work for me. Newman spent an entire novel fleshing out these characters, only to abandon most of them at the end of the book. It left me feeling cheated and confused. Did I miss the point, or was it all pointless? I'm not sure, but it definitely detracted from my overall enjoyment of the book. 2.5 stars, rounded up for Newman's sheer genius with language.

Interesting concept, good character development. The story was moving a little slow for me and the descriptions of the videos were kind of hard to read. The whole thing felt more like a screenplay and would probably make a great tv show but it wasn’t my favorite read.

Extraordinary. The story propels you forward with dread and excitement. The prose is beautiful. The characterizations so poignant. A wonderful and daring novel.

This book was not what I expected so I will only base my review off the writing. Which I though was well done and very descriptive. The world building was great and detailed. The writing was nice and easy to follow; maybe the novel might have been a little wordy.

3/5 - without measuring in any of the drama surrounding the book.

Unfortunately, I could not get into this enough to bring myself to care what happened or to finish it. I gave it until about 30% before giving up. The premise of the story seems like a good idea, but I just couldn’t get into this one.

Novels (including graphic novels) that feature people of one gender entirely disappearing or being written out of the human life equation have proven to be popular. Stephen King and his son Owen wrote a sprawling book called Sleeping Beauties not too long ago, and this novel posits the question, “what would the world be like if all the women in it just fell asleep, only to be reawakened as savage beasts who attack men?” However, it’s the flip side of that proposition that’s arguably proving to be more attractive to writers: what would the world be like without men? To that end, you have the comic book series Y: The Last Man, whose title pretty much tells you all that you need to know. More recently, Christina Sweeney-Baird published The End of Men, which is the story of a COVID-like virus that kills off most of the world’s men and what the fallout of this means for women as they try to remake society for themselves. There are probably plenty of other examples out there, but here comes a new book that fixates on the notion that one day all the world’s men just … poof! … disappear. Readers, meet Sandra Newman’s The Men.

The story centers around a woman named Jane Pearson, who is camping with her husband and her five-year-old son in the wilderness of California one late August day when, suddenly, they vanish without a trace. And I mean vanish: they didn’t simply just wander off down some canyon trail or anything. After Jane spends days looking for her family and struggles with her loss, she starts to ruminate on her tumultuous past: she’s a former ballerina and convicted sex offender (which is a bit of a long story) and was friends with a Black woman who killed two police officers — a woman who will wield a lot of power in this man-less world. Jane’s story is interwoven with the tales of other American women who are experiencing the tragedy of losing their male loved ones — even if these men weren’t really all that loved or loveable. Tying this all together is a series of Internet videos that have mysteriously appeared in this female-only world. These videos show nearly catatonic men languishing in a desolate, strange landscape with alien animals and creatures hovering around them. However, complications arise when some women watching the footage recognize loved ones they’ve lost.

I’m going to say that The Men is a very mysterious novel, even with its feminist trappings. It also starts out very slowly, and it will take many readers a long time to settle into the plot. It wasn’t until I was halfway through the book that I really started to warm up to this one. Also, potential readers should know that Newman spends an awful lot of real estate detailing women’s sweat and how women sweat — seemingly to prove that women are capable of being as gross as men, perhaps. In any event, this is one slow burn of a read. It doesn’t help much that the videos that feature prominently are so out there that the author thinks they’re more interesting than they actually are. Folks, I minored in film studies at university and can tell you that I’ve seen many experimental films in my day — and what I can tell you about them is that most of them (save, perhaps, for some of Jean-Luc Godard’s work) are quite boring. (And I realize that’s kind of the point of these films — they’re trying to score leftie political points without resorting to Hollywood spectacle.) Put that experimentation on the printed page, and you wind up having to settle in for a massive snooze-fest. It’s only when Jane’s backstory really emerges and the loose ends with the other women of the narrative get tied up, that things start moving and turn interesting.

People are going to think that I’m really slamming this novel, but the whole stories within stories aspect of The Men was quite unnecessary. It felt like padding in a book that’s already less than 300 pages long. The novel would have been much more interesting if it focused solely on what happens to Jane — and cut down on some of that narrative, especially in the early going — rather than breaking off and telling us what’s happening to other women. It’s a bit confusing trying to keep character names straight for people we barely get to hear from. And, as it turns out, their stories really have absolutely no barring on the narrative at all! A more scrupulous editor was needed for this novel. What’s more — because I’m on a roll here — the ending feels like one big cop-out. It’s as though Newman had written herself into a corner, didn’t know how to get out, so — by magic, in the same way that anyone with a Y chromosome just flickered off into the ether at the start — she just abolishes the corner she had written herself into entirely. It’s particularly disappointing, even if there’s a point to how this all resolves.

All this to say, you might think that I disliked The Men. It does have its pluses. The backstories of the main characters in this are interesting, even if Jane’s sex offender background is a little hard to believe (in that the police would even charge her knowing that she was being coerced by an older man into raping young boys). There’s an interesting examination of the notion of race and privilege, and the all-woman setting is quite fascinating — even if it doesn’t hop around to other countries, and the women of America somehow manage to get society quickly back on its feet without much in the way of catty infighting. Thus, there are a lot of things to feast on in this novel — even if some of it is as bland as the oatmeal I sometimes make. Essentially, the great American novel of men’s disappearance has yet to be written, but The Men is interesting enough at times. If you’ve read the books talked about in the first paragraph of this review, you should enjoy this uneven dystopian novel. That’s all that needs to be said, really. The Men knows who its audience is, that’s for sure, and that audience is bound to enjoy a story that shit-kicks the hell out of (sometimes toxic) masculinity. Passing this one now over to you.

It’s fine?

Ok. So. I read this book largely because of the forceful criticism it’s received, and because I had just read that OTHER sex apocalypse novel that just came out. I was fully expecting this to be an awful, virulently transphobic mess.

Instead, it’s just a self-centered mess. It’s not actively transphobic, though I guess certain elements of it are passively transphobic in the way that not being actively anti-racist is being passively racist.

There are no real trans characters. I don’t actually mind this, because better to not center someone than to mess it up with a horrible stereotype. It feels both like the author knew she wasn’t capable of doing a good job handling her premise from that viewpoint, and like she wasn’t particularly interested in tackling the viewpoint of a trans man— and if she had, it would have been a very different book in many ways.

Ultimately, the book is about a selfish woman who hides from her past while letting it define her. There’s honestly no GOOD narrative reason for the disappearance of men except to give her a reason to reflect on her past and to live separately from her family through no fault or choice of her own. It’s an entertaining story at times, and attempts to tackle issues with underage sex, racism and attraction to the other, cults and religion and the power of sacrifice, all through a quasi-feminist… or maybe feminisht?… lens. It’s bloated and suffers from too many disparate storylines in the early parts, with a lack of conclusion in the end. Plus, the main protagonist is both unlikeable but also too boring to hate. She’s written in a somewhat detached way, which makes sense with her history of trauma, but which makes it hard to care about her and tedious to follow her.

Also, the end but just doesn’t work for me— the transition from point A to point B by just… what, walking and the world goes fuzzy and pops? No. That’s silly.

The most unrealistic part to me was how quickly society restore itself and got a supply chain working. Or maybe it was the minimization of violence or drugs or theft among the general population. But to supply chain issues— After Covid, I don’t care how motivated people are, half the population being gone means goodbye supply chain. And without electricity or a working supply chain, a lot of the foundation aspects of the second half would simply not have been possible. It’s just too much of a stretch. I can suspend my belief for the fantasy aspects, but I can’t suspend my belief that a world in which AIRPLANES WERE FALLING OUT OF THE SKY got its shit together again in less than a month.

There's a lot of hate out there for this book but most of isn't about the novel itself, but rather about whether Newman is transphobic. Leaving that and political matters aside, it's not a great book, in part because the basic plot line has been done before and better, notably in the End of Men. I admit to having given up on this because I kept hearing echos of other novels. That said, Newman is an interesting writer who uses language in powerful ways. Thanks to netgalley for the ARC.

An interesting and extremely polarizing (based on the reviews that were left on goodreads) read about the aftermath of a strange event in which all men suddenly vanish. Just poof, disappear without a trace.

In The Men, we are with Jane, who was napping in a hammock while her husband and five year old son are cooking and hanging out camping in the woods, as she awakens to find them missing. Isolated from the rest of the town, she doesn't understand what has happened, believing them to have gone for a walk and gotten lost or hurt, or worse. It isn't until she drives down off the mountain that the reality of the situation finally starts to sink in.

The immediate panic everyone else was thrown into has begun to settle and we see women adapting to the men's absence. Sure, they miss their hubands and sons and brothers and friends. And yes, planes fell from the sky, and people died on operating tables, and the power and water failed for a while. But as society grieves, so do they also pull together to keep things going.

Jane discovers an ex-girlfriend is leading a new rising political power called ComPA and as they reunite, and as we are treated to much of their backstories, both in their times before and with each other, we are also introduced introduced to a few other women who begin watching The Men, which is widely believed to be deepfake live-streaming footage of the men marching through a barren, damaged place and accompanied by creepy, alien-like animals. But at end of each of these clips, the names of all of those who were filmed appear in the credits, and many women become glued to the tv, waiting and hoping, or perhaps not hoping?, to see if their men are there.

What is this strange footage? Is it a hoax? From where is it streaming? Where have the men really gone? Not to worry, folks. Readers who hang in there seeking the answers to those questions will be rewarded at the end.

A quirky and fractured spin on the female-only dystopia genre.

Trauma and loss are the true themes of this science fiction

Published by Granta Books
€14.99

STIRRING up controversy before it hasn’t even been published is probably not such a bad thing for an author. Sandra Newman’s The Men found itself in a Twitter row when the basic premise was revealed – what if all the men in the world (or, more specifically and accurately, people with a Y chromosome) suddenly, inexplicably disappeared?

It has been done before, largely without taking into consideration transwomen and non-binary and intersex people, and Newman does acknowledge this within the narrative. Nonetheless it is easy to conclude that the concept is outdated and reductive, particularly when there is an initial imagining that the world will automatically be a better place once the men (or those who identify as men, who have a Y chromosome) have vanished.

However, it’s not as simple as that, and it takes actually reading the book to realise it. At first, it’s a fairly standard structure, with one first-person perspective and a number of third-person narratives beginning the story, following them from the chaotic first days to about a year after. Then it pivots somewhere quite different.

Emails begin to surface of what is purportedly the disappeared, who are in random groups in a strange looking world containing what appear to be oversized, mutated animals. The people there are zombie-like, seeming move without free will, in a weirdly coloured landscape that resembles our world, if it had been put through a kaleidoscope.

There is debate over whether the videos are real or fake, but a devoted fanbase emerges, mostly those who are desperate to catch a glimpse of a loved one. As the story moves forward a divide between those who watch and those who don’t emerges.

The primary character is Jane, a woman who had been convicted of a terrible crime committed under duress while she was a teenager. She is connected to Evangelyne, a charismatic philosopher and social justice campaigner who in turn is the tie that binds all of the narratives.

This is a novel about grief, loss and trauma. While there are significant allusions to politics – Evangelyne is on track to become president on the back of her revolutionary manifesto – it is mostly concerned with individual, personal reactions to unthinkable catastrophe.

It also doesn’t paint (broad term) women as angels who are the only hope to save the world. There are nods towards a “four legs good, two legs bad” scenario, and a suggestion that solving a problem by eliminating an entire group of people isn’t actually such a great idea. The Men is a strange and disturbing novel that at its heart questions the human condition that craves love and connection in all its forms, and what that means in terms of the greater good.

The concept of ‘The Men’ interested me and this is my first (and definitely last) foray into the ‘gender apocalypse’ sub genre. It's set in a world just like ours where everyone with a ‘Y’ chromosome disappears. Even if you ignore the obvious transphobic issue this raises (the author recently announced they are non binary and I therefore assumed this would lead to an inclusive and different point of view, I was so wrong) - if half the population disappears overnight how on earth could the country be back on its feet again within 10 days?? I guess I was just hoping for a more intelligent analysis of what this could mean for society. The side characters were unmemorable and uninspiring and added nothing to the plot. The main characters had wild backstories and actually the book would have been much better if it dropped the main premise of the gender apocalypse (which it actually doesn’t deal with at all) and just delved into the lives of the two women. Finally, the ending was so terrible I wanted to throw the book at the wall.

The Men messed with my head in more ways than one. Am I glad I read it? Yes, I tried something different and it made me really think. Would I ever recommend it or read it again? Hell no.