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Gather the Daughters

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Gather the Daughters

By: Jennie Melamed
Narrated by: Laurence Bouvard
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About this listen

For fans of Emma Cline's The Girls and Emily St John Mandel's Station 11, this dark, unsettling and hugely compelling story of an isolated island cult will get under your skin.

On a small isolated island, there's a community that lives by its own rules. Boys grow up knowing they will one day reign inside and outside the home, while girls know they will be married and pregnant within moments of hitting womanhood. But before that time comes, there is an island ritual that offers children an exhilarating reprieve. Every summer they are turned out onto their doorsteps to roam wild: they run, they fight, they sleep on the beach and build camps in trees. They are free.

It is at the end of one of these summers, as the first frost laces the ground, that one of the younger girls witnesses something she was never supposed to see. And she returns home, muddy and terrified, clutching in her small hand a truth that could unravel their carefully constructed island world forever.

©2017 Jennie Melamed (P)2017 Headline Publishing Group Ltd Dystopian Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Science Fiction Fiction

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All stars
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There was a good story in there but it was so drawn out and repetitive that it could have been told in half the time. I started to lose patience as there seemed to be insufficient development in the story.

Excessively drawn out.

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Trigger warning for child abuse/ sexual abuse but well worth listening to if you can stomach it. Very well thought out and executed, this book was an emotional roller-coaster from start to finish. I'd recommend listening to it in segments due to the nature of the topics within.

Challenging, heartbreaking and utterly riveting

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The reader is never quiet sure, neither are the girls, when realisation of the sickness both physical and moral becomes apparent its appalling, a chilling warning of twisted patriarchy

A great performance delivering both innocence and bleakness

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Why would any woman from the wasteland agree to such disturbing terms? Like the idea of the wasteland v the island and keeping the children and women sweet but I think the daughters bit and the draft is a step too far.

Hmm. Definitely some plot holes.

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Struggled to finish. Lacks detail in word building, with slow plot. Found characters frustrating in inability to achieve anything. Generally unsatisfied.

Political Relevance, But Turgid Plot

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Liked the strong female characters and the way the story challenges and questions morality. I will definitely read her next book.

Fabulously thought provoking.

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This is a novel about community sponsored child abuse in a society were little girls become ‘little wives’ to their fathers. When they hit puberty they are forced to partake in orgies before being selected as actual wives. If they don’t comply they are drugged. Wide spread domestic violence is acceptable and the malformed babies that result are murdered at birth. When a plague hits the island one mother ridiculously asks ‘what have we done to deserve this’??!!! There is no resolution to conclude the narrative so I was just left feeling complicit, unable to shake the feeling of revulsion. Although the reading of this was fantastic, I wish I had gone with my gut and switch it off.

Incest, child abuse and domestic violence

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This was a bizarre story, it could have been amazing, but it lost itself midway.

Awful

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Story is pretty directionless and depressing. Totally unnecessary element of paedophilia. End only concerns one character, all the others forgotten. The whole world of the story is nonsensical to some degree and unrelatible. Feels like a very long, relentlessly depressing prologue.

Narrator has a nice voice, but insists on all her characters speaking in varying degrees of a horrible, grating, whiney tone. It's pretty unbearable and, like elements of the story, completely unnecessary.

Read The Last Midwife or The Handmaid's Tale if you want a good, compelling, dystopian,p anti-female novel.

Nothing much gping for this one

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It’s a shame really as the concept was quite good but never really seemed to go anywhere. There are lots of things that are left unanswered and the plot just sort of ticks over with no gravity. The performance is OK but when the cast is a group of young girls a lot of the voices inevitably go down the high pitched whiney route to make then distinctive. This is incredibly hard to listen to. If I was to describe this book in one word it would be ‘meh’.

Mediocre

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