⠀ ⠀ 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.
• she clutches so hard onto the time before and her memories of her freedom. reminiscing nostalgically of regular, simple things, for obvious reasons. shes determined not to give her identity and her self up entirely to her role, the rebellion of keeping what little amount of personal identity she has left and can hide.

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."