THE BOOK OF FLORA

The restless conclusion of The Road to
Nowhere trilogy, set generations after a virulent disease killed most men
and even more women, making women a precious commodity and childbirth
a hazardous enterprise.

Flora, a transwoman raised as a sex slave, tells her story
from essentially two points of view: as an old woman writing her autobiography
after many years of residence on Bambritch (Bainbridge) Island near
Settle (Seattle) as an invasion looms; and as a younger woman continuing the
plot from The Book of Etta (2017), sprinkled with memories of
her difficult childhood and adolescence. Having killed
the Estiel (St. Louis) warlord known as the Lion, the survivors of
his harem have taken somewhat uneasy refuge in the underground town
of Ommun, a matriarchal Mormon community led by Alma, whose many
successful pregnancies and supposedly divine visions have led her followers to
believe her a prophet. Flora; her lover Alice, a skilled herbalist and
occasional abortionist; the transman Eddy, Flora’s unrequited love and one of
Alice’s other lovers; and a small group of followers reject Alma’s
theocratic governance and return to the world above, where they
search for somewhere that will allow them to live without the threat of slavers
and rigid expectations of gender and sexuality. The market is currently flooded
with dystopias in which women are valued for their breeding and rarity as
sexual receptacles, where the divide between women and men has grown and the
definition of gender is more rigidly reinforced. This series, and
this book in particular, refreshingly argues that despite violent
opposition, an imbalance in the number of women and men might offer
more freedom for some to make their own definitions of gender,
sexuality, and selfhood and that even in a world where fertility is
damaged and pregnancy a risk, one doesn’t need to devote oneself to having or
facilitating the having of babies to be valuable. If the story has a
flaw, it is the author’s penchant to suddenly introduce a meaty bit of plot
just before the book ends and then quickly conclude without fully exploring
it.

A thoughtful extrapolation of contemporary gender and sexuality
issues in need of wider discussion and understanding.