⠀ ⠀ began: 09.22.2025 ⠀ | ⠀ finished: tba

GENRE: dystopian fiction, science fiction, speculative fiction, novel

NOTES

• some things are written intentionally vague or implicit, relying heavy on context clues to convey the meaning of certain things. i think this is very fitting to the book and adds an interesting layer of immersion, as if you are living with these characters and can only be told certain things through implication, the same as the other women in the book. it conveys very well how restricted communication became in this society.
• the non-chronological telling of certain events in the narrator's life feels like you're watching straight out of her brain, muddled by memories and scrambled thoughts.
• i was thinking about, at the red center, how moira and the narrator were only able to contact each other through the hole in the stall. that hole was obviously created for something that the women were now being taught was wrong, and yet through it they could have secret meetings only between them. im having a hard time writing my thoughts out on this one but i think its sad how only through a hole initially made for something "dirty" can they now have their own secret meetings of their own, not solely for pleasure but just to comfort each other. in a sense its a "dirty pleasure" on its own, to seek each others friendship when they weren't supposed to, and to reminisce on the lives they lived beforehand, even though doing so could bring them loads of trouble.
• i really like how the narrator is written.

QUOTES

• "waste not want not. i am not being wasted. why do i want?"
• "there is more than one kind of freedom... freedom to and freedom from. in the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. now you are being given freedom from. don't underrate it."
• "it's french, he said. from m'aidez. help me."
• "nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death before you knew it."
• "buttered, i lie on my single bed, flat, like a piece of toast."