Hurdy Gurdy by Jenny Ackland is a feminist near future dystopian with an all-female travelling circus that does abortions on the side. Yes you read that correctly.

This book was a lot. A lot of themes and a mish-mash of style and tone which for me didn't quite work. Why the circus performance setting? It gave off Station Eleven vibes but did not have the strength of writing and plot to carry it off. It was chaotic and unnerving and odd. There was a feminism vs religion battle happening. I'm sorry to say this one was just not for me.

Thank you to @netgalley and @allenandunwin for my #gifted copy. Hurdy Gurdy is out 4 June.

This is an unusual and original novel set in a climate ravaged Australia. The story follows two separate groups. First, narrated by Win, is a rundown circus troupe, all women, plus a tiger and a horse. On the side, Queenie, the matriarch performs ‘reclamations’ (abortions) for desperate women. One of the other women in the circus, Valentina is Russian and there’s these strange interludes about the history of clowns and communist humour. The other narrative line is narrated by ‘The Woman’. She accompanies a preacher who treats her like rubbish and who wants to track down whoever is doing abortions. All civil society seems to have collapsed, and the treatment of women seems to have regressed to extreme misogyny.
It’s a strangely compelling read and I’m sure I’ll be thinking about it for a while.

"We have to think of the women first. We have to help them. Men protect each other so we women have to do the same." I liked the concept of Hurdy Gurdy more than the execution. I found it a bit of a dreary and confusing read in the first half of the book. Once you finally understood it is a story about a troupe of traveling circus performers who also performed abortions, including er... late abortions where they dispatch the odd child rapist or wife beater ("Queenie calls it a dispatch, a community service"), it started to flow better and get a bit of tension.

I assume the front of the book is deliberate blurry as it overlaps with Win coming to awareness of what she's assisting the circus matriarch Queenie to do in the "reclamations". The early chapters have a sing-song tone and a lack of certainty that I found hard to engage with. There are snippets that draw upon historical Australian responses to sexual violence: "It sits inside the woman, it has a mechanism built-in that shreds anything that goes in, it might be a finger or something else." These nuggets kept me reading, but in small doses: I took nearly two weeks to finish it.