Excessively drawn out.

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.

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Challenging, heartbreaking and utterly riveting

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.

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A great performance delivering both innocence and bleakness

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

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Hmm. Definitely some plot holes.

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.

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Political Relevance, But Turgid Plot

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

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Fabulously thought provoking.

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

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Incest, child abuse and domestic violence

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.

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Awful

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

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Nothing much gping for this one

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.

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2 people found this helpful

Mediocre

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’.

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