LiseyDuck (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dynamite_lady) wrote2015-04-26 05:12 pm
dynamite_lady) wrote2015-04-26 05:12 pm
Review: Only Ever Yours (Louise O'Neill)
I'm going to start off by saying that this book does not ever in any way have a happy ending, and if you sustain yourself through a dystopia by hoping for such a thing you'll be disappointed. (Go read Saci Lloyd's Carbon Diaries if that's your thing) Luckily my view of human nature isn't a whole lot more optimistic than O'Neill's seems to be, so I wasn't too shocked.
Only Ever Yours is kind of hard to pigeonhole. It starts out as just another girls' school story and you might wonder why you should be interested in the bunch of vapid fashionistas you encounter within a few pages. But it quickly becomes obvious that this isn't *quite* girlhood as we know it.
After some major ecological disaster humanity has retreated to live in 'domes', very Buckminster Fuller except he didn't envision it quite like this. For some reason being on the edge of disaster has precipitated a renewed bout of sexism, culminating in a repulsion on women's part at the prospect of having female babies. Years go by with only boys being born - it takes ridiculously long for anyone to wonder who these boys will breed with. Of course the solution isn't to value women and encourage the remaining fertile ones to try reproducing themselves. That would be too simple. The solution the authorities come up with is to create baby girls (known as 'eves') in a laboratory - a new batch each year, three times as many as there have been boys born so the boys get a choice of who to marry - and raise them in special schools where they learn to be vapid man-pleasers whose only interests are fashion and stabbing their mates in the back. (To some extent that sounds like the influences teenage girls get now, but at least our society puts up some pretence of trying to counteract it. Seriously, this place has every affliction anyone in charge of a group of teenage girls would normally fight and encourages it.)
This is the story of frieda (female names in this story don't have capital letters, which aside from the political connotations makes it a pain in the bum to read at times), an eve in her final year at the School. frieda worries about her weight (nb trigger warnings up the wazoo if you're feeling fragile on this subject), her colouring (paler girls are preferred in this culture) and her ranking (she's in the top ten but not high enough to be safe), and latterly about her friend isabel. isabel starts out as the no.1 eve, but seems to be going through some sort of crisis that her apparent special status doesn't warrant. (We do find the reason eventually - it's creepy as anything) In a matter of months, the boys (Inheritants) will get to choose their companions, relegating the rest of the girls to the role of concubine. (The occasional lucky/unlucky one, depending on your outlook, becomes a 'chastity' - one of the nuns who teach the girls in the School. These are rare.) If the atmosphere was toxic before, and frieda gives a strong impression that it was, it is only going to get worse.
Long story short, frieda falls for Darwin, the no.1 inheritant, and that's where shit gets real. frieda, in addition to being the special least-favourite of headmistress chastity-ruth, is also the target of all the popular girls who would love to pick on isabel but aren't allowed to. Of course, because this is a story about stereotypical female conditioning writ large, there is a lot of passive-aggressiveness and minor sabotage. (If you've been on the receiving end of this you'll know how quickly it adds up) Once it becomes clear that frieda and Darwin might be A Thing, this steps up to a point that a girl who could walk away and have her own life MIGHT just be able to get over after a few decades, but of course frieda isn't that girl.
Someone called this book 'Handmaid's Tale crossed with Mean Girls', and I think that sums it up nicely. It stands as a massive warning for how bad things could get if we let them. It is also, however, a great read and one I've picked up maybe four times since buying it last July for a long train journey. I love all the little details O'Neill adds into her world, the music and TV shows that are the girls' opiates, the vintage Barbie speaking book that gets judged as too intellectual for the eves because it says 'math is hard', the little snippets of information about life in other Zones.
Only Ever Yours is kind of hard to pigeonhole. It starts out as just another girls' school story and you might wonder why you should be interested in the bunch of vapid fashionistas you encounter within a few pages. But it quickly becomes obvious that this isn't *quite* girlhood as we know it.
After some major ecological disaster humanity has retreated to live in 'domes', very Buckminster Fuller except he didn't envision it quite like this. For some reason being on the edge of disaster has precipitated a renewed bout of sexism, culminating in a repulsion on women's part at the prospect of having female babies. Years go by with only boys being born - it takes ridiculously long for anyone to wonder who these boys will breed with. Of course the solution isn't to value women and encourage the remaining fertile ones to try reproducing themselves. That would be too simple. The solution the authorities come up with is to create baby girls (known as 'eves') in a laboratory - a new batch each year, three times as many as there have been boys born so the boys get a choice of who to marry - and raise them in special schools where they learn to be vapid man-pleasers whose only interests are fashion and stabbing their mates in the back. (To some extent that sounds like the influences teenage girls get now, but at least our society puts up some pretence of trying to counteract it. Seriously, this place has every affliction anyone in charge of a group of teenage girls would normally fight and encourages it.)
This is the story of frieda (female names in this story don't have capital letters, which aside from the political connotations makes it a pain in the bum to read at times), an eve in her final year at the School. frieda worries about her weight (nb trigger warnings up the wazoo if you're feeling fragile on this subject), her colouring (paler girls are preferred in this culture) and her ranking (she's in the top ten but not high enough to be safe), and latterly about her friend isabel. isabel starts out as the no.1 eve, but seems to be going through some sort of crisis that her apparent special status doesn't warrant. (We do find the reason eventually - it's creepy as anything) In a matter of months, the boys (Inheritants) will get to choose their companions, relegating the rest of the girls to the role of concubine. (The occasional lucky/unlucky one, depending on your outlook, becomes a 'chastity' - one of the nuns who teach the girls in the School. These are rare.) If the atmosphere was toxic before, and frieda gives a strong impression that it was, it is only going to get worse.
Long story short, frieda falls for Darwin, the no.1 inheritant, and that's where shit gets real. frieda, in addition to being the special least-favourite of headmistress chastity-ruth, is also the target of all the popular girls who would love to pick on isabel but aren't allowed to. Of course, because this is a story about stereotypical female conditioning writ large, there is a lot of passive-aggressiveness and minor sabotage. (If you've been on the receiving end of this you'll know how quickly it adds up) Once it becomes clear that frieda and Darwin might be A Thing, this steps up to a point that a girl who could walk away and have her own life MIGHT just be able to get over after a few decades, but of course frieda isn't that girl.
Someone called this book 'Handmaid's Tale crossed with Mean Girls', and I think that sums it up nicely. It stands as a massive warning for how bad things could get if we let them. It is also, however, a great read and one I've picked up maybe four times since buying it last July for a long train journey. I love all the little details O'Neill adds into her world, the music and TV shows that are the girls' opiates, the vintage Barbie speaking book that gets judged as too intellectual for the eves because it says 'math is hard', the little snippets of information about life in other Zones.