Gather the Daughters by Jennie Melamed

Gather the Daughters is a tour-de-force of gut-wrenching creepiness. I like dystopian futures crafted by writers whose visions of what could be is just off-kilter enough to exact change in the real world. But this.....Melamed clearly has drawn from her experiences working with abused children. She tells the tale of a disturbing culture ruled by men, as told through the eyes of multiple female children.

All the girls in the community grow up hearing about the wasteland...a burning, inhospitable place for people. Years ago the ancestors came to this island and made a life for themselves, each family contributing to their closed society. Children are free in the summers to play and wander. But come the year of fruition, girls become women, and women have one role to play in their society.

Kudos to Melamed for portraying all of her characters with their necessary levels of creepiness and fear, without having to be grossly explicit in all of the details. I loved being pulled along in the story wondering "what's going to happen next" as each new detail about the isolated community is revealed and we are ushered into the secrets of what it means to be a good daughter.

When the English Fall by David Williams

There was something compelling about the basic premise of this story: what would a peaceful people do when apocalyptic events push them to their limits? Told in the form of an Amish man's journal entries, we get a glimpse into the events as they unfold around their community.

Admittedly, I felt it was a little too safe but reconciled this with the fact that it is an Amish man who is telling the story. It made sense that he would couch everything in terms of thankfulness and hope. As a general rule I stay away from books like that; I'm not a pessimist, but a realist. A reality where everything is tied up neatly in the end annoys me because that's not how life is. I suppose in that way this book did not disappoint. I closed it in the end feeling OK with how Williams chose to resolve the Amish decision, but unsettled enough to not hate it.