This was this months pick for the Dystopian Novels Book Club. It is a science fiction novel set in a future where women have been stripped of all rights in the US. Humans have gained contact with multiple alien species, and only a subset of linguist families called The Lines are able to communicate with them. There are a group of women who are creating their own language centred around the female perspective in the hope of freeing themselves.
I really did not get on with this book, most of the story was told through people sat around explaining it to each other. I started imagining each sentence beginning with a hidden “As we all know…” since so often there seemed to be no reason for the characters to be saying it. Conversations went around and around in circles with characters always between slightly annoyed or furious with each other never quite getting to the point.
There’s a couple of interesting premises in it, but I was never given the chance to think about them myself since the characters endlessly explained them. Despite that most of the characters were pretty indistinguishable, and the world was very poorly fleshed out. The linguists all live together in an ascetic way because people hate them. It’s not really explained why people do, we’re never really shown it, the way they’re living clearly hasn’t stopped it, and it feels more like they’d been seen as powerful diplomats or pop-stars.
There are a group of non-linguists trying to figure out how to communicate with the aliens themselves by doing experiments on babies that just felt ridiculous.