THE BOOK OF ETTA

The follow-up to The Book of the Unnamed Midwife (2014), set in a broken U.S. decades after a pandemic has killed most of the population.

In the town of Nowhere, women essentially have two life paths: They can try to bear a child (an enterprise which frequently kills both mother and baby) or train as Midwives and help other women. But Etta has rejected both possibilities: Instead, she is a raider, traveling outside the town to battle slavers and rescue girls and young women from their clutches. But what no one in Nowhere knows is that Etta does more than simply dress as a man when she leaves town: She actually takes on a male persona, calling himself Eddy. Unable to face the restrictions of being Etta, desperate to realize himself more fully as Eddy and find someone who will love his true self, Eddy makes various journeys away from home on his self-imposed rescue missions, interacting with several societies that each has a different way of dealing with the realities that biological men significantly outnumber biological women and children are a rarity. Eventually, although he tries desperately to avoid it, Eddy will be forced to revisit the one place he really doesn’t want to go: Estiel (the former St. Louis), the city controlled by the vicious warlord known as the Lion and the place of a devastating past trauma. Eddy is a fascinatingly complex character, shifting back and forth between female and male identities. His personal journey toward self-realization is made more difficult by the rigidity of his viewpoints about gender, love, and what values cannot be compromised, even for survival in a fairly brutal landscape. That inflexibility, plus his rape as a teenager and his strong preference for biological women, makes it impossible for him to accept the love of Flora, a transwoman and former sex slave, even though she accepts and understands him more than anyone else. Sadly, that rejection helps to hasten the plot’s devastating climax and is a realistic portrayal of how one’s own struggles don’t necessarily instill an immediate empathy for others’ situations.

Pulls no punches.