Only Ever Yours/Louise O'Neill This book drew me in and had me thinking about it until I finished it, though I definitely want to pull out my hair after the ending.
 
Despite being a totally dystopian world that is (hopefully) very far from our own, it was so easy to fall into this world and to truly envision it and imagine how it might be. Though there were many really unusual concepts, O'Neill weaved each beautifully in so that as a reader I understood the world she created without needing to have each concept explained. My only concern with this book was the plausibility of how this world was created, as the plausibility of life being set up as was a little hard to accept. However, I suspended my disbelief and had no other issues.
 
This book was incredibly thorough on details. Small stylistic choices such as not capitalising the names of females, calling eggs 'eggies,' and calling girls 'eves' like Eve, the biblical character, really placed me in this world she's created. I'm definitely going to have to reread this one because there were a lot of well placed hints and cues that I only noticed thinking back on the book. This book is an incredible example of world building.
The characters were artfully designed in a manner that felt scarily like real-life. Though the girls in this society are created and raised differently than those in ours, I could see similarities and patterns. O'Neill writes very strongly and Freida's voice was very natural and flowing. Discerning her mental state was simple thanks to the writing.
 
This also includes great social commentary on sexism, and, more subtly interwoven, racism. It does have a lot of similarities to "The Handmaid's Tale" but it has its own entirely new spin that sets it far apart.
 
I am satisfied with the ending, also. Perhaps displeased, but respectfully satisfied and impressed.
 
It'll leave you thinking and wondering about the mediocrity of simple life and the lack of importance every day might bring against the importance simple decisions hold. I know I'll be mulling this one for a while.
 
I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. ( )

Good gravy, that was bleak. In a good way, because it was thought provoking, but sheesh. I wanted a little sunshine. The ending felt authentic to the story, so I was glad for that, but ugghhh, my anxiety was tough to deal with.

It probably won't escape comparisons to The Handmaid's Tale, but it went in the other direction. Where The Handmaid's Tale took morality to extremes, Only Ever Yours took consumerism and the patriarchy (the commodification of women, especially) to extremes.

Worth reading? 100% yes.

( )

Terribly triggering.
The narrator's voice explains how their world came to be zones:
" there was relief at first, the hope that they had found an organic solution to the population crisis, but that soon turned to fear. The remaining people moving inward and inward and inward, until the zones were formed to protect the remaining few from the scalding sun and the rising waters. The Noah project. 2x2 the humans entered, all marching forward to create a new world. They got rid of anything we would not need, like animals, and organized religion. They got rid of anything that would weigh us down. "
They had the amer zone, they had the chindia zone, and they had the Euro zone. This story takes place in the euro zone. There are three occupations for women: chastities, who take care of and teach the girls from four till 16. Then there are the concubines, who serve the men who want to have nastier sex than what they have with their companions. The companions are the third occupation, who Marry and give their husbands since.. There is bitter competition, strife, for first place. The top 10 girls, at the age of 16, will compete for the top 10 inheritors. Boys who are sons of so-called important men.

They have a social media called my face, I guess a cross between Myspace and facebook. Rolling eyeballs

The saddest character is isabel, who early on was chosen by "the father," He is the dictator. He got tired of his companion, and wanted Isabel for his next one. When they get tired of their companions, they throw them on the pyre. The father tried out Isabel when she was 16, and hurt her badly, so she tried getting fat to see if he would dislike her. They wouldn't allow her to do that though, they took over with meds and 24-hour surveillance. So then she tried to kill herself by not eating anything. So they put a feeding tube in her. in the end, she had to go with the father, but she hung herself to escape. I'm getting ahead of myself though.

There's a nasty show on TV called Botched Redesigns, something like that. One time Freida is watching it, and there's a woman named natasha. She wanted to have her vagina redesigned,
"He looks at her unsmilingly over the thin wire frames of his glasses and she cringes. 'As I was saying, natasha, there were a few complications.' he beckons her to the corner of the office, gesturing at her to stand on a raised wooden block in front of a full-length mirror. He pulls her skirt up around her waist and unravels the thick bandages swaddling her like a new-design's diaper. I blink once, twice, wondering if I am going crazy.
'These things happen unfortunately.' the re-designer shrugs.
The camera zooms in on Natasha as she leans closer to the mirror searching for something that she will never find again. A hint of forbidden tears freezes over her pale green eyes, the fine lines and wrinkles becoming more pronounced as her face crumples with the effort to control her emotions. I turn it off. She's 37, I tell myself. 37. She is only 3 years away from her termination date anyway."
Yes, they kill women when they're 40. On to the pyre they go.

Frida likes an inheritor named Darwin, who is the number one ranked inheritor. The girls get sessions with the inheritors when it becomes close to the date of the ceremony where they'll be chosen for their occupations. Darwin is the son of the judge of the Eurozone, a cruel man who beats his son. Freida will do anything to make Darwin like her, including liking music that he chooses for her:
"He begins to bring presents with him more frequently. a thick cuff with a faceted Amber Stone in the center follows the earrings. The download of an album by an obscure indie band from the Americas that I have never heard of.
'I love their music,' I lie, and his eyes light up in excitement. 'Especially their earlier stuff.' We sit in the cupboard, sharing one set of earbuds, their "best song ever" threatening to split my eardrums in half. He bobs his head in time to the noise, stuffing his hands into the pouch at the front of yet another hooded sweatshirt."
When Darwin starts losing interest in Freida, she gives him sex to try to make him like her. this was one of the most triggering parts of the book. she gave him her virginity, and he just used her and then threw her away.

So many innocent girls do this, because of lack of guidance, with nobody to look out for them, and because of our social mores, that says it's fine for boys and men to be sluts, to have sex with as many girls and women as possible, to ruin their innocence, to make them pregnant, to throw them away. ( )

Oh no. This book was awful. It's terrible. 400 pages of the protagonist never making a decision or displaying any agency, pages and pages of clothing descriptions, and an entirely unchanged status quo at the end.
It feels like a student's reaction to the prompt "The Handmaid's Tale for Teens, but Fashion" or "What if Patriarchy, but Too Much."
It could be interpreted as a commentary on the ultimate distillation of cis hetero patriarchy, but it never says much about it other than "hey, wouldn't it suck if they said the quiet part loud?"

SPOILERS FROM HERE ON

Nothing is revealed until the very end, but there are enough hints that the twists do not feel unexpected. The protagonist had no agency at any point in the plot. I kept reading, expecting her to make a decision, to take a stand on something, to discover something deep within herself that she cared about, but she didn't. It was a long book with excruciating detail, pages after pages of outfits and body angst, and a main character whose only motivation is to be liked, and who never expresses her opinion on the rare occasions when she can be bothered to think of one. Beyond that, we get the flimsiest bits of world building, ostensibly because the section of this dystopian society we're following is closed off, with no one on the inside knowing or caring about the world beyond. However, it comes across as careless, like a shaky explanation for how this world could ever exist. The author's justification is that climate change, combined with a sudden plague that killed all female embryos in the womb, drove the human race nearly to extinction, with populations in the low thousands. Humans constructed domes to live in, with fake wall screens for sky, and managed to live in a world devoid of plants and animals. Men create women in laboratories based on their ideals of womanhood, which are exaggerated 20th century stereotypes of vapid, vain people obsessed with clothes and social status. The girls are constantly subjected to propaganda about how unattractive and fat they are, and they are pitted against one another.
As previously stated, the main character does not make any independent decisions throughout the novel. She never had power and never sought it. She has a tragic ending that reveals she is just one of many troublemakers ultimately crushed by the society (although she never actually causes significant trouble). I suppose the author chose to show us a failed version of the YA dystopia girlboss, claiming that many will try and fail before one is cunning enough to succeed. That was the most charitable interpretation I could come up with for the ending's messaging, but there didn't really seem to be one.
Overall, it was a slog that triggered my eating disorder and left the status quo completely unchanged at the end of the book, which I would consider....a bad thing. A novel with no discernible plot. It says nothing insightful about the issues it raises. ( )

I guess I was expecting much more. The whole idea of the book is quite intriguing and the actual plot describes a sickening world that no woman (can we call the eves women?) would wish to live in. However, I wasn't too fond on how the plot was developed. I got too mad at freida way too many times (how could she think like that?!), but I do understand her trains of thought given the world (or the little of it) that she knew and the education she was given.
I found the begining of the book very similar to The Handmaid's Tale - however, and fortunately, it was nice getting into a character that had no knowledge of the world before, or the world "outside". I also liked freida's development as a character.

The biggest downsides were the lack of info on the world outside the School and its society (I wanted to know more) and isabel, who I think had a lot of potential and we could have so much more of freida and her. Also, the ending was very disappointing - it felt like it happened in like 2 pages and it was way too fast. ( )