I just wanted to thank the publisher for giving me the opportunity to read this ARC. However, I have unfortunately DNF’d the book at 15% in. I really tried to get into it and read more but I just couldn’t do it. The premise sounded so interesting but it just truthfully wasn’t for me. It was too weirdly sexual and honestly a bit confusing. There were too many times that I didn’t understand what was going on and when I thought I wasn’t confused anymore, I was just right back to being confused.

After centuries of violence, men have been reduced to as small a percentage of the population as possible without risking inbreeding. Maren Uthaug presents an unsettling future earth where women rule. Women teach their children (almost entirely daughters, as boys don’t count as children in this society) about the evils of the patriarchy, about how males must be controlled so that their testosterone doesn’t cause them to rape and murder. In Eleven Percent, four women, living in what used to be Denmark, tell a story about gender, faith, secrets, and betrayal. This book is masterfully translated by Caroline Waight.

Medea, a witchy woman who raises snakes, bookends the novel. Through her, we learn about the various factions women have split into after the (unexplained) Evolution and the end of the patriarchy. Some women, like Medea and other members of her dwindling coven, deal mostly in herbal medicine and a bit of spellwork. Others, like Medea’s lover Wicca, follow a gender-flipped version of Christianity where Mother has replaced a masculine god. Yet others are trying to create something new by erasing as many remnants of the past as they can. Medea is also unique in her society because she and her sisters, Eldest and Silence, are keeping a very dangerous secret hidden: a young male child. If found, the boy would be taken away to the concentration camps, where men are drugged and kept for breeding or sex. Medea and the others will be sentenced to an oath of silence and forced labor.

When the perspective switches to the spoiled Wicca, we learn more about the appalling fate of men in this woman’s world. Wicca’s only goal is to become a great priest like her mother but, in spite of her impressive bloodline, she doesn’t have the ability to turn snake venom into divine visions. She can’t even keep snakes alive for more than a few weeks. Her cover-ups and blunders are a huge source of conflict in Eleven Percent. To be honest, I was glad when the book moved away from her narrative because I loathed her.

The most interesting narrators for me were Silence and Eva. Their chapters take us into the past and offer further chilling revelations about what happens to those who have the bad luck to be born male in this world. Silence and Eva’s stories are hard to read because they are full of a deep longing for love and for someone to understand them, even though they don’t fit in with the other girls and women. Then, in a flash, everything goes terribly wrong.

I struggled with Eleven Percent. I’ve read other books—Y: The Last Man and The Power—where women were either in the majority or found a way to become the dominant gender. In those books, women also abuse their power over men and other women, arguing that humans will always find a way to oppress a minority given a chance. Where Y: The Last Man turned the premise into a thriller and The Power is clearly satirical, Eleven Percent isn’t written as a story where balance can be restored or as a thought experiment. The lack of literary devices to offer some mental distance, plus some absolutely horrific themes, made this book a very uncomfortable read for me.

Interesting but strange in a way that’s hard to explain. It owes a lot to Greek mythology, but mixing it with modernity and putting it in Scandinavia is just strange. I’m not saying it had to be in the US, but it dampened down the dystopian aspect.

I loved this imaginative dystopian read! It's essentially an inverse Handmaid's Tale which makes for a rich and fascinating world. I was immediately captivated by this story and its multifaceted characters.

The blurb for this sounded so interesting but it honestly started to go downhill on page one when Medea started making bloodcakes with period blood . I had to read the multiple times because I kept thinking I must be reading it wrong .

Just not for me

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review

A very odd book about a matriarchal society that has eliminated all but 11% of men. I found it fascinating all the ways the author turned patriarchy on its head. Labeling men as dangerous and dim-witted and good for nothing but pleasure and occasionally reproduction, to be kept in "Centers" like drug-addled cattle, was really dark....and yet, when you consider just how many novels and movies and other media exists where the women are kept and treated as inconsequential cattle, this doesn't seem so far-fetched. Patriarchy destroyed the world, and women have been battling ever since to restore the planet to a better state. I loved all the little details, especially the fact that this matriarchal society used rounded structures and bases to build their society - straight lines and edges represented the patriarchy and were being knocked down and rebuilt to reflect this new society.

But biggest issue was the characters themselves. I did not find most of them likeable. Wicca in particular was unbearable. Very selfish and self-centered and did not care at all about anyone else around her. She left a bad taste in my mouth. Medea was interesting, as were Silence and especially Eva, and it was fun to read about how their lives intersected.

In a future version of our world, the patriarchal system of government, thought, and even species has been upended. The world is now completely run by women, with males being relegated to clinics, where they are trained and drugged to be compliant and non-aggressive. But four women, Medea, Wicca, Silence, and Eva are all experiencing this world in different ways. Medea, a snake breeder and witch, sees the decline of the males as a perversion of the balance of nature. Wicca, a priestess who's firm religious beliefs blind her to anyone's problems but her own. Silence, a non-verbal young woman who's plagued by guilt over a childhood experience. And Eva, a clinic technician who trains the young males at the clinic, but is hiding a secret to could destroy them all.

An interesting and thought-provoking exploration of what happens when you take today's political and societal atmosphere of a male-dominated world and invert it completely, does our society thrive or stagnate?

Thank you to Netgalley and SMP for the arc!

Unfortunately, Eleven Percent was just not for me and I've read some weird shit.

i was interested after reading the description. The beginning about Lilith and Eden was interesting but I quickly became confused.

This book was chaotic and intriguing. The four stories of Medea, Wicca, Silence, and Eva interconnect in a unique way, and through their stories, we get to see different facets of society and how the world has changed hundreds of years into the future after the "Evolution." It takes place in Denmark and is a novel in translation - which might be why some of the chapters come off as choppy? We see life through the lens of witches, female priestesses (Christianity has been changed back to its "original" form to worship the Mother), childhood, and ladymen. While there are mentions about how schooling has changed, how sex and female relationships have evolved, and deteriorating patriarchal structures, I wish there would've been more mention about how the government changed - how was the world organized? What did the change look like during the Evolution? Why were there so many people living in the slums? It felt communal, but also like there was some kind of crisis going on that wasn't addressed. I liked the book - it made me think, and brought up a lot of questions. I just wish more was answered within the book about their world. Definitely stuck with me! Thank you for the ARC!

Eleven Percent by Maren Uthaug, I was super excited to read this world ran by women but once I dived in, all I wanted to do was get the hell out. I knew from the beginning this book was translated from Danish and as those are some of my favorite reads I couldn’t wait the world of women seems like a world worse than one ran by “the patriarchy“ the book is mainly focused on Madea who lives in a rundown convent although she is a witch she lives there with silence, another woman named Elder, a little boy in a menagerie of snakes and a couple of dogs. Madea is secretly involved with a priest named Wicka and for those who want to be with men there’s brothel type houses where men are, but they also have transgender women with prosthetic you know whats. in the book it seems like having your flow is more a religious occurrence as opposed to a bodily function Madea even makes period cookies and for the life of me despite reading the whole book I have no idea why she does this. They save their menstrual cycles in a cup for her the snakes are also used in a religious scenario they’re just a lot happening in the book and I would love to tell you a good summary but I would be lying because for the most part I have no idea what was happening. I know by the end her python Pithia is very ill and can only be OK if she has the blood of a man but the point and or overall theme of the book escapes me. A lot of things in this book are ridiculous from the fact they don’t want anything made by a man and they seem worse than men because they keep the males as sex slaves. I wanted so much to love this book and although I continued reading I can honestly say there was a lot of stuff I either didn’t understand or it was outright confusing. I feel so bad when I don’t like a book because I know authors spend a lot of time writing it and they’re so proud of it and I’m sure if I could read this in its original language maybe that would make it better or more digestible but I cannot and so this is my opinion on the translated version. #NetGalley,#TheBlindReviewer, #MyReview,#MarenUthaug, #ElevenPercent,

Eleven Percent flips the Handmaid's Tale script and imagines a world where women are the majority, and only 11 percent of the population is male (the very bare minimum they have to keep to stay genetically healthy). Maren Uthaug deftly maneuvers the pros and cons of anyone having all power - even women.

In the New Time, men are locked in "spas" and women rule the mostly round communities. Some women take issue with the treatment of the men, and others feel the system is working the best it can. Following four different women, Eleven Percent examines the many angles of religion, the patriarchy and socially enforced gender roles in the midst of a truly entertaining sci-fi plot.

DNF @8%

To start, I loved the little blip of the creation story and wish it would have been expanded because it was really short and quick. After that, everything goes downhill for me. We start the story with menstrual blood baked into cakes and feeding stillborn puppies to snakes in the first couple of pages. Writing wise, there were abrupt ends to scenes and I just felt eternally confused about everything. I know I didn't give it much time to even out but I was confused enough that I couldn't get into the story at all or understand what was happening. I don't think I'll pick this book up again.

Review goes live May 5

Thanks to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for the eARC!

This book made me really sad. I do realize that dystopian fiction is not likely to be bright and happy, but I think I went into this book with some misconceptions. I think I saw the phrase 'inverse Handmaid's Tale,' and glossed over the rest.
Some of the lore that set up this "feminist haven" was really interesting - the roots of Christianity are brought back, while the history of how religion became so patriarchal in the first place was really interesting. The obsession with snakes was weird at first, but even that made sense in the end.
And if the sign of a good book is one you can't stop thinking about, then this one definitely hit the mark. I didn't always love the language of the book, but the author (and translator) did an amazing job of creating a world unlike our own. But also weird similar? It's definitely a thought-provoking book, but please know that some trigger warnings do apply, and I wish I had known about them. These include (but aren't limited to): child abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, and transphobia. While none of these (except the last one) are discussed in great detail, the last section is going to be the hardest to read, especially if you've experienced (or know someone who has) any kind of gender dysphoria. I cried basically the entire way through the last section, and I'm cisgender.
I did enjoy the way the author unraveled the story, even when I didn't like elements of the story.
If dystopia is your jam or if you like thought-provoking books, I think you'll like this, even if it wasn't for me, and I probably wouldn't read it again.

The concept of this one sounded great. However, the info dumping and menstrual blood cakes quickly lost me from the start. I set it down and couldn't bring myself to pick it up again.

Reading this book, I couldn’t help but be reminded of a poem I was made to read in university, The Lady’s Dressing Room by Jonathan Swift. The poem itself was first published in 1732, and seeks (through comedy) to convey the ridiculousness of inherent feminine “goodness” or innocence by pointing out that women can be just as disgusting as men. Eleven Percent is basically the same premise, just with a dystopian twist.
Personally, while I admired the message behind this book; that without regard to intersectional bias women are not any more equipped to run the world than men are—the way in which that message was conveyed just made this book feel like a chauvenist’s fevered nightmare. Basically, the world building is thus, women have taken over but their unified front is very much restricted to the same sort of racial, economical, and theological power dynamics that plague our patriarchal society. As a result, nothing has really changed except a newfound push to destroy and break down everything to do with the “old ways” (i.e. anything associated with men), even if it means having to rebuild it at a deficit.
I suppose, if you aren’t super familiar with intersectional feminism as a theory, this narrative would be a lot more groundbreaking. However, for me, it was just a little too surface level. As a modern feminist I already understand that radicalized white-centric feminism isn’t the answer to solving all the world’s problems, and that power will corrupt anyone, regardless of gender. As a result Eleven Percent comes off as a little preachy with how blunt it is.

This story felt wholly original but at the same time believable (not unlike reading 'The Handmaid's Tale' or 'Manhunt'). In this dystopia future, men are essentially held in captivity because of scientific advances believed regarding their testosterone -- and women largely populate and dominate the world.

The four main characters (and a minor character, Lars) weaved together quite seamlessly in a way that sometimes felt predictable but ultimately served the main story so well. Each character felt wholly shaped with light and dark, making them feel intensely real and human. The story flew by quickly and I found myself wanting to know more about where all of these characters ended up.

Ultimately, I liked this much more than I was initially expecting during the first few pages -- this is the epitome of a slow start, strong finish for me. Highly recommend if you enjoy female-dominated dystopia stories.

I decided to DNF this book at 20%. While the writing was good and the book was easy to follow, unfortunately this book just couldn't capture me. While the premise is great, the world of priestesses with their snakes wasn't interesting to me at all. I found myself dreading picking up this book to read and ultimately decided it was best I moved on. I appreciate the opportunity to read this one! I will rate this at a 3 so my personal preference doesn't skew the book down.

The beginning of this book is very info dumpy and I’m really not enjoying it. The concept of this book seemed really cool but I can’t get past the first chapter.

I'm still not sure if this book is utopian or distopian. It was somehow both beautiful and horrifying. I think it will appeal to readers of literary fiction and women's fiction. I'll definitely be recommending it to my customers!