I loved it!

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“She’s just got then.’…
I nodded
“And you allow it to happen.”
“We don’t allow anything. It isn’t up to us.”
“But you live with it. You accept it.”
She could only see the horror of it.

Alexis Schaitkin’s powerful imagination deploys the genre of speculative fiction to explore the dystopian, cult-like world that that Vera inhabits with her family. As we enter her world, a stranger named Ruth enters it and starts to question Vera’s world. Though speculative fiction is still an emerging genre, it allows the author to have the freedom to create themes, circumstances, and explore issues that realism/fantasy would not, as it happens to be a mix of all genres including mythology, fantasy, and so on. This novel is also difficult to read at a personal level not only because of the theme of mysterious “disappearance” of mothers given current events @katiegutierrez tweeted about this novel, but this coming weekend is the 7th year when my mother left us. If you are unfamiliar with the genre of speculative fiction, Schatkin’s novel is a great entry point because the themes are so familiar even in an unfamiliar world.

I found Schatkin’s writing familiar and accessible - a powerful work of speculative fiction!