I was into the premise of this, but it just isn't what I wanted it to be.

Plenty of transphobe vibes and women being awful people.

For once I'd like to read a story of the matriarchy where we do a better job than the patriarchy cause I think it's more than plausible.

📖 Title: Eleven Percent

✍🏾 Author: Maren Uthaug-new to me author

📅Publication date: 4-22- 25 | Read 4-18-25

📃 Page Count: 304 pgs.

🏃🏾‍➡️Run Time: 10:15

🗣️Narrator: Cassandra Campbell voices all the characters with standouts from Medea, Eva, and Wicca. The reading style brought the text to life, and the author and narrator worked together perfectly. The pacing and flow allowed me to get lost in the story. The narrator paused and announced new chapters and there was a table of contents which helped me follow along.

Genre:
*Sci Fi
*Fantasy
*Women's Fic

Tropes:
*dystopia
*feminism
*pet friendly-snakes, birds, rats, and dogs
*sexuality
*religion
*pregnancy

👆🏾POV: 3rd person, multiple

⚠️TW: reassignment surgery, threat of rape-just mentioned

Summary: Eleven percent of the male population remains to give pleasure and procreate. Four women live their lives in this dystopian society that believes it is better off without men.

👩🏾 Heroine: Medea-lives @ convent in the slums, a snake whisperer

👩🏾 Heroine: Wicca- a Christian priest

👩🏾 Heroine: Silence- a mute who lives @ the convent with Medea.

👩🏾Heroine: Eva - Dr. at the spa centers for juvenile males.

🎭 Other Characters:

* Chaplin-Benja's childhood friend from the slum
* Lars-a neighbor in the slums who nurses babies, gets "treatment" from Eva
* Kali-Wicca's ex-partner
* Eldest-cares for "the boy"(Kali's son)
*Nanna-a Dr. Eva worked with, was in love w/ her

🤔 My Thoughts: I'm not sure what I just finished but this female-dominated world was a little bleak for me. These four women- Medea, Silence, Eva, and Wicca- lived or visited the slums and hid their "real" identities from the world. Each one had a past secret that manifested in their current lives.

Rating: 3/5 ✨
Spice level 4/5 🌶️

🙏🏾Thanks to NetGalley, St. Martin's Press, RB Media| Recorded Books, and Maren Uthaug for this ARC & ALC! I voluntarily give my honest review, and all opinions are my own.

Do you ever finish a book and go “what the hell did I just read”? Eleven Percent is a super weird with an almost night terror-like quality to it. The time period shifted a few times to slowly reveal some elements of the story that didn’t make sense in the dystopian world or to give context to various characters. I liked the author’s method of storytelling and can see how many fans of literary fiction would enjoy this. Eleven Percent is thought provoking and bizarre on various fronts. I initially picked this up because the blurb caught my interest. An inverse story of The Handmaid’s Tale where men are sequestered to their own limited areas and used for breeding purposes sounds intriguing. However, the execution just wasn’t my cup of tea, but I believe that’s more of a me problem rather than anything to do with the writing. If you enjoy stories that veer over to the more strange, you’d probably love this and it would be a great book to pick apart and analyze.

Thank you to St. Martin’s Press, NetGalley, and the author for sending me an early copy!

Eleven Percent is a deeply unsettling and strangely compelling read—not one for the squeamish. With strong echoes of The Handmaid’s Tale, but flipping the power dynamics, this story explores a dystopian world where women are in control. The historical underpinnings add an intriguing layer, though the narrative leans heavily into bizarre and visceral territory, especially when it comes to menstrual imagery. It’s not exactly dark humor—just dark, plain and simple. This book is unapologetically odd, and it demands a very specific kind of mood to fully engage with its themes. If you’re up for something uncomfortable, unconventional, and completely out there, this might just be the one.

This was a very interesting read, im actually shocked at how much this story kept me entertained. This dystopian world was unique and intriguing,

I tried my best to get into this book multiple times but just couldn’t do it.
The idea sounds promising but I think this story just wasn’t for me.
An unfortunate DNF.
Thank you so much for the opportunity to advance read this.

2.5* rounded up

When I saw the summary for this book I immediately hit request. An inversion of The Handmaid’s Tale? Surely the world will be a sort of utopia until of course it isn’t, because there has to be a plot.

I was disappointed on both counts. In the first few chapters I learned that there are slums in this matriarchal world, which is so strange. Women wouldn’t want people to live in poverty and the people in the slums are other women. Men are confined to centres. I soon read that there are still hierarchies and have and have-nots. I hoped it would serve the plot.

Witches are accepted as a group but are also outcasts. There are “manladies” that are sex workers who are women with silicone penises which seems like a strange criticism of trans men.

It seems like this matriarchy is still oppressing people. I guess it was a more literal inversion of The Handmaid’s Tale than I was expecting. There’s a sexual relationship between the protagonist and another woman that clearly has an imbalance of power. And why are all the women sleeping with each other? That is a patriarchal idea; that all women are bisexual.

There’s education but it isn’t universal. Our protagonist didn’t get any traditional schooling; of which obligatory masturbation is a part. Without men, the women live 180 years but it’s never really explained why.

The whole book is mostly a collection of intertwined people. Their lives and stories intersect but nothing changes in this new world where males are subhuman. They are subjugated as sex slaves in centres where women have to pass tests to have sex with them. The actual plot was lost in the translation from the Dutch. I’m not really sure what the point was except to see that a matriarchal society wouldn’t be a utopia. The characters were interesting and had quirks and flaws. The world building was well done too. The descriptions of how the world had changed and advanced since men were subjugated kept my interest.

I was so hoping for something more from this story. I did see there is a sequel and I’d probably read it because I’m hoping for some resolution to these women’s lives which seem very hard. There just wasn’t much plot here.

The premise of this book was so good but unfortunately it just did not live up to what it promised. I struggled to get through the story and the plot felt very weak.
Thank you to Netgalley and to the publishers for allowing me to read this advanced copy.

This title sounded extremely intriguing but it was just too strange for my taste. It's like a reverse Handmaid's Tale, where society is way more matriarchal and there are maybe 11% of men who are kept in special centers to "service" the women. This story centers on 4 of these women, Medea, Wicca, Eva and Silence. They are linked by circumstances, fate and their pasts.
I'd like to tack on an extra star but the description of an unskilled castration and the horror this poor child endured through her mother was enough to illicit sympathy but not enough to make me recommend this title. The writing is poignant and visceral, however, and may appeal to female rage.

*Special thanks to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press fort this digital e-arc.*

An intriguing dystopian novel about four women in a world turned inside out from what we know. It won't be for everyone (I wasn't sure it was for me) due to some graphic gross things and attitudes but it is thought provoking. The women are well drawn and the worldbuilding is good. Thanks to netgalley for the ARC. For fans of world fiction and dystopian scenarios.

This was a much darker read than I was expecting, however I really loved the setup and I loved the worldbuilding. I liked how the story was told from four very unique perspectives though I didn't really like any of the characters. I don't think that the blurb for this book captures the "mood" for this book. I was picturing something closer to Yours for the Taking by Gabrielle Korn but this book was a lot darker. That said, I know I have some friends who will love this, I just don't think that it's something you can casually pick up if you don't normally read darker books.

While Eleven Percent is referred to as an “inverse Handmaid’s Tale,” I found the reality of the narrative to be far more complex and compelling than that comparison suggests. Through the perspectives of Medea, Wicca, Eva, and Silence, Uthaug offers more than a speculative power reversal—she invites us to interrogate the very meaning of gender, power, and societal structure in a world where one gender dominates.
This story is, at times, disturbing, distressing, and even outright disgusting—but above all, it’s deeply thought-provoking. Uthaug doesn’t offer utopia; instead, she explores the limits of freedom—for women, for those who don’t fit neatly into binary categories, and for anyone caught outside the newly constructed norms.
Despite the shift in who holds power, the society depicted still carries the burdens of classism, exclusion, and religious control. A flipped hierarchy is still a hierarchy, and those deemed “undesirable” remain marginalized or forgotten. The novel asks: if the system is simply inverted, is anything truly transformed?
The world-building here is brilliantly executed. Rather than relying on exposition or info-dumps, Uthaug unfolds the intricacies of this society gradually, through character perspective. Each new voice adds depth to the reader’s understanding of how this world works—and whom it fails.
While I didn’t love every character, each one served a clear purpose in revealing different angles of life under this matriarchal regime. They’re flawed, human, and often deeply conflicted—either struggling to survive or to conform. Even with the power dynamic reversed, the society they live in feels just as restrictive as any patriarchal one. There may be new rules, but there are still rules.
One aspect I especially appreciated was the casual queerness woven throughout the novel. With men largely absent from society, many characters engage in sapphic relationships as a default. Even the relationships of trans and non-binary characters in this world are depicted with care and validity, even as they face their own unique struggles.
Overall, Eleven Percent is not just a flipped version of a familiar dystopia—it’s a bold, uncomfortable, and intelligent exploration of what power does to people, no matter who holds it.

Not really my thing.

Thank you NetGally and St Martin’s Press for early access in exchange for an honest review.

Publication Date : April 22, 2025

I loved the idea of this book. And I think some of the reviews on it are completely unfair. Especially people not reading it because of the blood cakes but will probably watch a horror movie where a woman gets butchered. But whatever.

I think like others I was just missing the plot. But I love that it is something unique and different when we get so much of the same stuff.

This had the coolest concept for me: reverse Handmaids Tale? A world run by the women? Sign me up for the feminist rage. Translations aren’t my go-to, but I’ve enjoyed them in the past and wasn’t deterred by it with this one.

However, DNF’ing at 40%. I’m struggling to see a plot for this book, it’s feeling kind of directionless — an imaginative scenario that’s sort of just spinning its tires and going nowhere but in a circle. I also took issue with some of the ideas presented… namely, that this book is set in the future, wherein modern society seemingly fell apart without the men; female crews and engineers couldn’t maintain everything? For such a feminist story, I couldn’t stop thinking about this hole.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the arc and alc.

Unfortunately, this book was not for me. I love Cassandra Campbell as an audiobook narrator, but this story was just too boring to get through in my opinion.

Unfortunately I had to DNF. I really wasn't vibing with the story and tried a few times to pick this up. Unfortunately it just wasn't for me.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for a gifted ARC of this novel!

This was a partial buddy read for me, and I personally picked this one up because I was intrigued by its premise. After reading though, I’m not sure this was the right book for me. Although there was strong character development and I enjoyed how the characters puzzle-pieced together, I felt as though this book was missing a traditional plot. Additionally, I kept questioning different things that would come up about the evolution or the backdrop to this novel that I feel like weren’t explained for readers. I understand that this book had high reviews elsewhere, but maybe isn’t the right fit for me personally.

I’ve been into reading a lot more translated works and am glad to have added Eleven Percent to the list as well. It’s always a curious thing to think about how much a translation can change the core of the book but given how distinct the storytelling is, I don’t see a lot being changed here.

I am a bit baffled by people’s reviews and the hang up on period blood cakes and find it a bit immature. Period blood and blood rituals have been used for centuries, especially by women and witches and loved the symbolism of the blood spells, rituals, snakes and all the very distinct imagery we got.

My only hang up was the time period of this book. From the comparisons of books like A Handmaids Tale, I expected more of a modern story but this was told in a way that felt very old, mythological and as a period piece. This wasn’t bad in any way but definitely changed a lot of my perspective going in to what I was going to get versus what I got.

Eleven Percent by Maren Uthaug is a captivating tale that kept me guessing right up until the very end. The intricate plot and well-developed characters drew me in from the very first page, making it a truly engaging read.