I had expected this book to be very much like Sheri Tepper's The Gate to Women's Country and at first, I felt it to be a weak story in comparison to Sheri Tepper's. But as the story progressed, it became very different. It reminded me more of Jean Auel's Earth Children series, and most of all of The Valley of the Horses. I ended up loving it and couldn't put it down! At first, I didn't really feel for the characters much, but they became more and more real. I would recommend it. ( )

I heard this book was great and so bought a copy. I really enjoyed the first half as the premise was great, a land where women are the logical beings and men are only there to perpetuate the race- the first part was interesting but then it just trickled away to sound like man bashing. ( )

http://nhw.livejournal.com/953841.htm...

Classic feminist sf, or at least that is how it is usually labelled: women live in hi-tech urban enclaves, while men are consigned to a nasty, brutish, short life of scrabbling in the wilderness, worshipping the female principle, as punishment for having caused the (unspecified) world-wrecking disaster centuries ago.

It's not that different from Sherri S. Tepper's The Gate to Women's Country. Sargent's characters are more three-dimensional, but her plot and setting rather less elaborate. I wondered where all the food for the women's cities was coming from; I also speculated a bit about the robustness of the command-and-control mechanism by which the women unleash deadly force on men when they get uppity.

The most extreme example of Sargent's rather inconsistent world-building is, oddly enough, in her erotic passages, where Hero gets it on with Heroine; they are raunchily written yet don't completely fit what we know of the environment - we are told that both of them have had same-sex physical relationships in the past, so the overtones of virginal discovery somehow aren't quite appropriate. ( )

http://www.sfreader.com/read_review.a... ( )

A classic so I'm hesitant to bag it. But it was a bit repetitive. worth reading as a historical feminist fiction,getting a picture of the zeitgeist of the feminsit movement in the mid eighties. but I was looking for a good sci-fi yarn. Good old sci-fi may seem dated but is still compelling. This one was just- dated, as a story. ( )