I Who Have Never Known Men is an incredibly powerful story. Brilliant world building. I enjoyed reading through the main characters perspective as she aged, The story had no closure and every question felt like it went unanswered. It makes you reflect on humanity and loneliness and our need for companionship. Utterly thought-provoking and I just know this book will stick with me for a long, long time.

REVIEW: I Who Have Never Known Men By Jacqueline Harpman

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/5

🚫 No Men | 🙈 Underground Bunker | ❤️ Existential Spiral

BABES. WHAT. DID. I. READ?
I started this book thinking “cute a short dystopian novella” and it ended up being BRUTAL! Like this book got me so f*ked up just like how I grew up thinking Britney Spears was wearing a mic in her Oops I Did It Again video but in reality she wasn’t. Millennial’s to the front. 😂

What the books promises 💅
🌎 Speculative Fiction
🧠 Psychological torment
🙈 So many questions

Vibe Check ✨
* Bleak and traumatic with a dash of poetic blissfulness
* I kept whispering “same girl” everytime she questions the meaning of life
* It’s giving “I’m not like these other dystopian novels”

📝 Book Breakdown
Imagine waking up in an underground bunker with 39 other women, no memory, no context, and the guards don’t even give you the courtesy of what’s good or bad. Our narrator? A girl who’s never known men, never known freedom, and never known why she’s there. But she’s got questions, and babes, she’s about to go full main character energy.

💭Final Thoughts
This book said “you want answers? LOL.” But I loved it. It’s weird, it’s raw, and it made me want to scream into the abyss and then journal about it even though I don’t journal. It’s really questions our existence, because the real question is, if we were stripped of all our beliefs/influences, who are we? Who are you? 💥

Thank you #netgalley for a copy of this fantastic book.

#bookreview #books #bookstagram #reading #nz #netgalley

If you’re looking for fun or uplifting, this is not the book for you! Or if you like books that wrap up nicely with all parts neatly explained, again, not for you. This is bleak, and sad - gave me The Road vibes (although less sad or gruesome). It definitely was a depressing journey, but I absolutely loved it. I think it’s brilliant.
.
I was completely captivated and on edge just waiting for something big to happen throughout the whole story. The foreboding, the anticipation - it’s all just done so well. The questioning of what it means to be alive, and even of how our thoughts work.
.
It’s a bit Vaster Wilds-ey too! I wish they’d met up and become friends! 🤣
.
Anyway, if you’re a lover of dystopian, morose, literary fiction then one is for you. 😊 This one would have been an incredible buddy read or book club pick!

This one of my absolute favourite dystopian stand-alones! I would describe I Who Have Never Known Men as literary speculative fiction and I think it will stick with a lot of readers long after they close the book.

I Who Have Never Known Men follows 40 women who have lived imprisoned for as long as they are able to tell. Few of them have disjointed memories from before the bunker, but the youngest of then, the unnamed narrator, only knows what the other women tell her from this time. They are guarded and kept alive by male guards who don't speak, until one day the cage is left open and the men flee. The group can now travel the surface of the world, discovering an unknowable amount of identical bunkers searching for survivors.

The journey the thinning group of women embark on is bleak, introspective and impossible to imagine if it were written by any other author. Jacqueline Harpman does a fantastic job or encouraging the reader to put themselves in the narrator's shoes and consider what they would choose: answers or peace. Even with minimal descriptions, the world in this book is so vivid and purposefully only a hop skip and a jump away from Earth today. There is a lot of really valuable commentary on the patriarchy and womanhood, and I 100% praise this as a contemporary classic.

devoured this book in two days and it honestly would’ve been a four or five star read if it hadn’t left me with more questions than answers! I know a lot of people will love the open-ended nature of this book but as someone who loves world building and having secrets revealed on page, it drove me nuts that there were so many really compelling questions raised that you just never get answers to.

That said, the writing was brilliant and I really did love being carried along by the narrator. Something about the constant stream of storytelling across what was effectively three really long chapters just sucked me in and I couldn’t stop reading. I might revisit this one day and find that I enjoy it more because I know there won’t be answers, so I can focus a bit more on the journey.

Overall a solid read and something I know the girlies who enjoy open-ended ‘thinking books’ will really love.