First American edition of Russ’s The Female Man (Bantam, 1975) with a cover illustration by American artist Morgan Kane (1916–2014). It would probably make more sense upon a second read, but I’m not sure if I’ll want to put my brain through the hard slog that is wading through this book again.From The Future Is Female! More Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women Photograph of Joanna Russ, 1984, by Ileen Weber (Wikipedia). It also hindered the impact the book could have had upon closing the cover at the end, because I was still trying to get my head around what on Earth was going on (literally). My enjoyment of the book was greatly hindered by the fact I was so confused all the way through. Though if I hadn’t known from the explanation in the Introduction maybe I would have been even more confused! It possibly would have been more exciting if I’d had no idea what was going to happen. The reveal in the last part of the book wasn’t much of a twist unfortunately, as I read what happened in the Introduction (I hate it when they do that). Whereas the chapters that were a few pages meant the scenes were long enough for me to be grounded in the scene and get my head around what was happening.Īs it went along I did have more understanding of each of the central characters, but even in the last quarter of the book there were times where I was confused about what was happening. Many of the short ones were confusing because they weren’t long enough for me to get my head around what was going on. Some of the problem was that the sections of the book are split into really short ‘chapters’, some of which are only a paragraph or even a sentence long. It also doesn’t help that all four characters have names beginning with J, though that is because they are parallel versions of the same person, it just added to the confusion. At some points I thought it might have changed to another character but I didn’t really have a clue. I couldn’t figure out who the first person narrator was. There are some really vivid images throughout the book, so that I could imagine these unusual alternative universes.įrom the start I was confused. I wasn’t really sure at all times exactly which version of Earth they were on. Whileaway is clear, but the two worlds that are very similar to our Earth were a bit confusing. The world building is creative for the two parallel worlds that are vastly different from Earth. It’s very imaginative and the parallel worlds are unique and captured my attention. What’s amazing to me is that this book was published in 1975, and some of the issues women face in the book are still around today. I liked the concept of exploring the restricted lives of women through parallel universes.

The idea for this book is brilliant, but I was too confused all the way through to be able to really enjoy it.

The Female Man by Joanna Russ