I can't say this book is perfect, but I'm still going to give it 5 🌟. It's about a land, probably north America, centuries after the nuclear apocalypse. When the Earth seemed healed enough, the survivors made their way from the underground shelters and began to create civilization again. Women gathered together, separating themselves from men, in the belief that men could not be trusted with the reins of leadership again, lest their tendency towards violence destroy the world again. So women built enclosed cities, leaving men to fight for survival in the wildernesses outside. They would variously be summoned to the walls to contribute their sperm, but were kept in ignorance of their purpose, believing the women to be aspects of the Goddess. Obviously, as other reviewers have pointed out, this is not really feminist literature, just because it has lesbians in it. Still, thoroughly enjoyable for characterization, world-building, and seeing men in the story get treated in some ways, the way they treat us. ( )

I liked it. An old style feminist SciFi. A little predictable but interesting enough to keep me going. ( )

This was a fairly slow moving book. The premise was interesting about a society where the men and women are segregated. The women live in a beautiful city and the men as savages out in the wild. The men come to the wall and have controlled breeding with the women. This is the story of a woman and a man who buck this convention. Not a romance even though my description sounds like it. I guess mostly what it told me was that a society of only men or only women won't really work well. Checks and balances. ( )

Well, I'd say it's weird, a bit depressing, and a bit hopeful. Worth the read. ( )

I was disappointed in this novel, at least as an engaging, "feminist" SF novel.

It's clearly a product of its time (1986, about 30 years ago): but even then, gender essentialism was only a small part of feminist thought and theory. It's vital to the premises of this novel, though.

Women and men have no actual contact with each other, and both have weird ideas of the Other. The women have claimed tech, and are stagnating in their walled citadels; meanwhile the men revel in life "nasty, brutish and short" outside. While the overall story arc depicts a small personal rapproachment, in general everyone on all sides stays resolutely gender-essentialist.

Now, this does mean that it might be an interesting book to teach in a feminist lit class, in which one would examine the premises- both of sex/gender, social status, etc.- in terms of a broader view of what humans are capable of. The book definitely raises some interesting questions, but it seems to me that they are mostly unaddressed, even in subtext.

Another flaw is that it went on far too long, and was quite repetitive. This may have been intentional, but it made the reading more of a slog that it could have been.

It did not help that none of the first-person protagonists were especially engaging, nor were most of the others. Our male protag flew into scary rages at the least hint of being thwarted; the females occasionally defied the powers that be, but then resigned themselves to oppression of one kind or another. Not a very hopeful look at humans, though possibly accurate...

Not recommended, except maybe in a book discussion or class context. ( )