Cut off from the mainland (which they’ve been told has burned to the ground, riddled with disease, sin and destruction, never to be habitable again) they live in a dystopian world without realizing that they really don’t. In Gather the Daughters, this island is no ordinary island, and these girls live no ordinary lifestyle. This was a novel with something to say, and Melamed’s voice carried far, loudly and still resonates in my head as I write this. It pressed up against the boundaries of my personal comfort levels - and then pushed passed them.
It was haunting, arresting, thought-provoking and confrontational in all the best ways possible. Jennie Melamed’s Gather the Daughters bowled me over in more ways than one. “When a daughter submits to her father’s will, when a wife submits to her husband, when a woman is a helper to a man, we are worshiping the ancestors and their vision.” GATHER THE DAUGHTERS is a smoldering debut dark and energetic, compulsively readable, Melamed's novel announces her as an unforgettable new voice in fiction. Trying urgently now to unravel the mysteries of the island and what lies beyond, before her own demise, she attempts to lead an uprising of the girls that may be their undoing. At seventeen years old, Janey is so unwilling to become a woman, she is slowly starving herself to death. And it is at the end of one summer that little Caitlin Jacob sees something so horrifying, so contradictory to the laws of the island, that she must share it with the others.īorn leader Janey Solomon steps up to seek the truth. With the adults indoors and the pubescent in Fruition, the children live wildly-they fight over food and shelter, free of their fathers' hands and their mothers' despair. But in the summer, the younger children reign supreme. They have children, who have children, and when they are no longer useful, they take their final draught and die. At the first sign of puberty, they face their Summer of Fruition, a ritualistic season that drags them from adolescence to matrimony.
The daughters of these men are wives-in-training. Only the Wanderers-chosen male descendants of the original ten-are allowed to cross to the wastelands, where they scavenge for detritus among the still-smoldering fires. They built a radical society of ancestor worship, controlled breeding, and the strict rationing of knowledge and history. Years ago, just before the country was incinerated to wasteland, ten men and their families colonized an island off the coast. NEVER LET ME GO meets THE GIVER in this haunting debut about a cult on an isolated island, where nothing is as it seems.
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