If I hadn't won Vox by Christina Dalcher in a Goodreads giveaway, I probably wouldn't have read it at all. I really don't enjoy reading dystopias. This is especially true during a pandemic when I'm already depressed enough, thank you.
So why did I enter the giveaway? I thought that it might deal with themes that are of interest to feminists, and honestly I didn't think I'd win a copy. The odds for entering giveaways are never in your favor. If I won, it might conceivably make for a provocative review, and if I didn't it wouldn't be a big loss for me. Believe me, if I am determined to read a book I wouldn't rely on a giveaway as my supplier. In this case, I wasn't feeling that motivated.
Once I read reviews from people I respect who weren't fans of Vox, I definitely wasn't in a hurry to read it. So I waited until it reached the top of my giveaway pile. This is a 2018 book that I won in 2019. I have five more books that I won from Goodreads in 2019 all of which I am looking forward to reading, as opposed to Vox which I am only reviewing out of a sense of obligation to Goodreads.
I'm blogging about this book because I have more to say about it than "Not my cup of tea."
In the Vox patriarchal dystopia women were limited to a hundred words a day. This implied that these men thought that if women had complete freedom of expression, they would say all these dangerous feminist things. Based on what I saw of the women in this novel, I sincerely doubt it.
Jean, the protagonist, didn't think much of her husband because she didn't think he was capable of violence. The premise is that a man should violently defend "his" woman. There are two problems for feminists there. A man who is capable of violence in defense of a woman, might very well be violent toward a woman. This isn't necessarily true. A man might be very controlled in his use of violence. Yet my feeling is that a man who has shown himself capable of violence is like a loaded gun. He isn't safe. He might go off on you. A woman is better off trusting a man who uses his wits rather than his fists. The other problem is that the man who violently protects a woman probably believes that a woman is his property. Jean had a friend who had been imprisoned by the dystopian authorities for being "recalcitrant". This was presumably an even more dangerous feminist than most women. Yet this friend also believed that a man should violently defend "his" woman. I suspect that none of these women were ever what I would call a feminist. What was the U.S. like before the dystopians took over? Was it more similar to the 1950's that the dystopians preferred than most readers might imagine?
I agree with those reviewers who thought that the resolution was both too easy and too predictable. I didn't agree with reviewers who argued that monogamy is so paramount that a husband that Jean didn't love was owed more than the man she always had loved. This prioritizing of monogamy is equivalent to the belief that a woman is a man's property that I was disputing in the previous paragraph. Yet it is a very prevalent idea. Perhaps our world is closer to the dystopia described in Vox than most readers realize.
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