Now they are here with no future, no answers to their questions, nothing. The memories of the women are hazy, they remember their former lives - although it is painful to think of them - but the actual catastrophe (as they call it) seems to involve a lot of fire, drugs and pain. The group is made up of women from all walks of life - housewives, nurses, waitresses, grandmothers and at the time they were taken, a toddler who doesn't even know her name. We meet the group through the Child's narrative about 12-15 years into their incarceration. The women have no privacy and are not even allowed to touch each other. The lights dim for "night" and brighten for "day". The guards (always in threes and are male) never speak but use their whips with startling accuracy. Their environment is totally artificial and completely controlled. I Who Have Never Known Men is the story about a nameless woman referred to as The Child, who was raised from toddler-hood with a group of women (40 in total) who are kept in a cage in an underground bunker. And since I loved The Handmaid's Tale and how much it scared me - I thought, HeckYeah! Count me in - I'm not sure how they came about tying these two books together because other than the subject matter of women losing freedoms and identity in a totalitarian-type of society - uh - that's it, really. I'm not sure how I found out about this book - I think I was reading some article that ran off a list of dystopian tales and compared Harpman's book with Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (Everyman's Library).
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