No One Is Talking about This, Patricia Lockwood
Lockwood’s short but intense novel follows an unnamed narrator and her experiences with the “portal” where she reads about and describes current events, which are eerily similar to those happening in the US (unsurprisingly, of course). The first half of the novel is rather impersonal; the narrator seems to be at a distance from everything happening around her and continues living her life more or less unaffected, But then her sister gets pregnant, and an abnormality is discovered with the baby after her state’s legal limit for abortion (exceptions are a farce). They have no idea whether, or for how long, the baby will survive after birth, but her sister is forced to endure the rest of her pregnancy and the birth because of the US’s draconian abortion laws. Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize, No One Is Talking about This depicts how half a country can be both unaffected and unbothered until it directly touches them, and what comes after.
Weyward, Emilia Hart
I consumed Weyward in two days – one could say that it is the opposite of No One Is Talking about This in at least one way, which is that while everyone goes unnamed in Lockwood’s novel, in Weyward, the name itself has great meaning. Each generation of women in Weyward bears this name, and eventually comes to recognize their power through it. The first, Altha, is tried for witchcraft (by men) in the 1600s and survives; the second, Violet, uses Altha’s knowledge to help her escape her fate after she is raped and becomes pregnant; and the third, Kate, uses both of her ancestors’ knowledge to escape an abusive relationship that also ends in pregnancy, but this time, Kate chooses to keep the baby and raise it on her own. What I really liked about Weyward is that it exposes what the ‘witchcraft’ trials were really about – men’s fear of women who lived apart from men, who did not need men, and who were not able to be controlled by men. The sham of the witchcraft trials was an attempt to bring these women under men’s control. We need more books like Hart’s, both fiction and nonfiction alike.