Maximum Occupancy

I love the push for more diverse writers in modern publishing. While I have always thought I was a diverse reader, what I am exposed to is limited to what publishers think will appease to a mass audience. I have been reading more science fiction and literary fiction from women and BIPOC authors, because there are more and more publishers giving chances to none white male authors.

And I love it.

Through her series Meg Elison does something that I wished for with a recent trilogy I read (Wool, Shift, and Dust), she gives voice to not just hetero women but also to queer and trans people. Which given the story she is telling seems to be a given, but is really a testimony to how good Meg Elison was with creating this dystopian world.

The Book of Etta is the second in the series stared with The Book of the Unnamed Midwife. A devastating flu kills most of the population, but especially women and female children. With societies collapsed, it focuses on the wasteland that is now America and how women and children are treated. The first book covers the initial events and foretells what to except. The Book of Etta picks up with one of the secret women cities/societies and what it means to be a queer woman (and maybe be even a trans man) in a society where reproducing and being a women is sacred if not a curse.

The entire series is graphic, but not in a way to re-traumatize readers, just to be realistic to why people are acting they way they are. The first book was so depressing that I had to sit on it for a year before I moved on. It is very much in tone like The Road. It is clearly a discussion of women’s rights and how quick the right we have is taken away in dire circumstances. There is no other way to convey the fear and urgency without including the different type of abuse the characters within the story face.

As we move onto The Book of Flora, knowing the story was going to end and having immersed myself in the first two novels, I think most readers can see the reveal at the end. This book is important because it is filled with the guilt and turmoil of the trans experience. While I cannot say I know what that must be like, I can appreciate how she imagines it and tries to tell a story that is outside of her norm. It gave me the opportunity to contemplate what queer people may face in the remnants of a broken down society that didn’t accept them in the best of times. I also learned shit. This series had me googling something with each one and being very mind blown emoji about it.

A short review, that is vague because I do not want to spoil it. This is all to say, this series is worth it and one of the few apocalyptic books that depends on reality and science (and not magic or religion) to tell a dark story that wraps up with an ending that is neither bitter or to impossibly beautiful and perfect.