Hardcover, 240 pages
Published Aug. 21, 2018 by Knopf Canada.
For several years, girls and women in the remote Mennonite colony of Molotschna have reported assaults in the night by what some in the community claim are ghosts or demons. Others blame “wild female imagination”—until several of the men behind the attacks are discovered and apprehended. While the men of the colony venture into town to bail out the accused, the women meet secretly to determine how to respond. They have just two days to decide before the men return, along with the assailants. Acerbic, funny, tender and wise, acclaimed author Miriam Toews’s spellbinding seventh novel contains a universe of thinking and feeling about gender, justice, freedom and power.
I’m still wrestling with this! She writes so sensitively and often affectingly obliquely about the tragedy that was forced on these women and their efforts to work through agency and safety and faith and love. I would not recommend this for anyone who has suffered sexual abuse without a great deal of preparation ahead of time
True to its title, this book contains a lot of talking. Women in a Mennonite community are deciding what to do after learning of abuse that has been perpetrated against them and their daughters while they were rendered unconscious.
There is a lot of philosophizing that arises from this discussion, but the problem is, the novel reads more like an essay than a story, in many ways.
This was not my favourite Toews work.
