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WORK TITLE: Gather the Daughters
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.jenniemelamed.com/
CITY: Seattle
STATE: WA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/12/gather-the-daughters-jennie-melamed-review
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2017098434
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/no2017098434
HEADING: Melamed, Jennie
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100 1_ |a Melamed, Jennie
370 __ |e Seattle (Wash.) |2 naf
374 __ |a Nurse practitioners |a Novelists |2 lcsh
375 __ |a Females |2 lcdgt
377 __ |a eng
670 __ |a Melamed, Jennie. Gather the daughters : a novel, 2017: |b title page (Jennie Melamed) jacket flap (Jennie Melamed is a psychiatric nurse practitioner; lives in Seattle)
PERSONAL
Married.
EDUCATION:University of Washington, doctoral studies.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Psychiatric nurse practitioner, writer, and novelist.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Jennie Melamed is a psychiatric nurse practitioner who works with traumatized children. During her doctoral work at the University of Washington, she investigated anthropological, biological, and cultural aspects of child abuse. In her debut novel, Gather the Daughters, Melamed presents a dystopian future where men on an island force girls into marriage when the girls reach puberty. In an interview for the Qwillery website, Melamed said she first got the basic idea for the novel when she was eighteen years old and realized many of her friends had suffered from child abuse, adding: “I began wondering what it would mean for abuse to be encoded into a culture.” Melamed also noted in the Qwillery interview: “When I was a child, I had post-apocalyptic daydreams all the time. She added: “To me, Gather the Daughters deals with types of violence that happen all the time, under our noses, and unless one has a way to be exposed to it, it happens hidden and unseen.”
In Gather the Daughters, the descendants of ten families live on a tiny island just beyond the mainland United States, which is referred to as “the Wastelands.” Writing for the London Independent Online, Lucy Scholes noted the story’s similarity to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale but went on to remark: “Unlike Atwood’s tale, though, we’re given barely any information regarding life beyond the island, Melamed cleverly keeping us as much in the dark, and thus just as frustrated, as her enquiring adolescent protagonists.” Ruled by elite adult men who call themselves “the Wanderers,” the island features no technology or money, with the people living on subsistence farming. The men sometimes take trips to the mainland to buy basic supplies. “Other men follow the kinds of trades one might find in a small medieval town: blacksmithing, weaving and carpentry,” wrote London Guardian Online contributor Sarah Moss.
Also as in medieval times, the women are relegated to homelife and chores. They are strictly regulated by the men and are allowed to meet unchaperoned by men only when one of the women is giving birth. This typically occurs shortly after girls reach puberty, when they are forced to be married and bear children. Although the society is strictly regulated via male domination, the women do have a brief period of freedom when they are children. Each summer they are allowed to roam the island, building camps and sleeping on the beach. It is the only time that they are really free. The women, however, are starting to chafe at their role in society. For example, Janey starves herself to delay puberty and retain what freedom she has. It is during one of the summer excursions that a younger girl witnesses something that has been kept hidden from the women, terrifying her and marking the beginning of what could be the end of male domination.
“Fearsome, vivid, and raw: Melamed’s work describes a world of indoctrination and revolt,” wrote a Kirkus Reviews contributor. Rebecca Vnuk, writing in Booklist, remarked: “Melamed’s gorgeous writing lets the details of this fundamentalist society drip out slowly,” calling Gather the Daughters a “quietly horrifying debut.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, July 1, 2017, Rebecca Vnuk, review of Gather the Daughters, p. 18.
Kirkus Reviews, May 15, 2017, review of Gather the Daughters.
Publishers Weekly, May 22, 2017, review of Gather the Daughters, p. 66.
ONLINE
All about Romance, https://allaboutromance.com/ (September 25, 2017), Dabney Grinnan, “An Interview with Jennie Melamed.”
Early Bird Gets the Bookworm, http://earlybirdgetsthebookworm.com/ (October 11, 2017), “Author Interview with Jennie Melamed.”
Guardian Online (London, England), https://www.theguardian.com/ (August 12, 2017), Sarah Moss, “Gather the Daughters by Jennie Melamed Review—a Misogynist Dystopia.”
Independent Online (London, England), http://www.independent.co.uk/ (July 26, 2017), Lucy Scholes, “Gather the Daughters by Jennie Melamed, Book Review: I Doubt It Will Become a Cult Classic.”
Jennie Melamed Website, http://www.jenniemelamed.com (February 20, 2018).
New York Times Online, https://www.nytimes.com/ (October 15, 2017), Claire Jarvis, “The Latest, Troubling Chapter in Feminist Dystopian Fiction,” review of Gather the Daughters.
Qwillery, http://qwillery.blogspot.com/ (July 28, 2017), “Interview with Jennie Melamed, Author of Gather the Daughters.”
Seattle Review of Books, http://www.seattlereviewofbooks.com/ (September 5, 2017), Conon Parks, review of Gather the Daughters.
Seattle Times Online, https://www.seattletimes.com (July 25, 2017), Ellen Emry Heltzel, “Gather the Daughters Review: A Grim Outlook for Women in a Fictional Dystopian World.”
USA Today Online, https://www.usatoday.com/ (July 25, 2017), Zlati Meyer, “Debut Novel ‘Daughters’ Recycles ‘Handmaid’s Tale.'”
BIO
Jennie Melamed is a psychiatric nurse practitioner who specializes in working with traumatized children. During her doctoral work at the University of Washington, she investigated anthropological, biological, and cultural aspects of child abuse.
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An interview with Jennie Melamed
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This summer two of our reviewers reviewed Jennie Melamed’s debut novel, Gather the Daughters. In her DIK review, Kristen wrote:
Gather the Daughters is a haunting tale of a society where women are controlled but children are free, and a young woman on the cusp of that transition discovers something that pulls her ideological foundations out from under her. It’s perhaps not for the faint of heart, but will definitely appeal to fans of engrossing dystopian fiction that lingers in the memory.
I reached out to Ms. Melamed and asked if she’d be willing to discuss the book.* She graciously said yes.
Dabney: I was on vacation with my large extended family when I read Gather the Daughters. It was a fascinating yet challenging book to read while surrounded by my clamorous and close clan. The book is… well, let me ask you. How would you describe this book?
Jennie: Gather the Daughters is a dark dystopia with feminist overtones, about an isolated cult at the end of the world. GTD looks at the evils of slavishly following culture and tradition, and the consequences of complete societal isolation, as well as the innate joy and resilience that reside in children and the strong bonds they form with each other.
Dabney: The slice of humanity you’ve created is one predicated on the evil inherent in man. More specifically, the evil that lurks in (some?) men. What was the genesis for your premise?
Jennie: The idea came to me in college, when so many people I knew- mostly women- were coming forward about the trials they had gone in childhood, at the hands of adults. But it didn’t really blossom until I was working in children’s behavioral health as a nurse. Many of the stories I heard broke my heart, and left me furious. In graduate school, I finally gained the capacity and the resources to explore real-world situations in which scenarios similar to my book had taken place, as well as the more complicated literature about the biological and psychological effects of childhood trauma. As a psychiatric nurse practitioner, I regularly work with children suffering the aftereffects of trauma and trying to navigate growing up in its shadow- and some who are, unfortunately, still living in chaos. It’s hard not to be angry at abusers, angry at adults, and yes, angry at men- because they are most often (although by no means always!) the perpetrators of child abuse. I have seen children who suffered such horrors at the hands of men that I shudder to think of it.
And then I have seen men be the helpers that assist these children in healing afterwards. I have a father, a brother, a husband, and multiple male friends whom I love dearly, and I am far from considering all men evil. I do think, though, that almost every one of us- male or female- could commit atrocious acts, were we born into the right circumstances.
Dabney: The voices of the young girls in this novel are clear and strong. In particular, I loved Janey. How did she figure out the connection between starvation and delaying menarche?
Jennie: I think in an island completely devoid of modern medical care, there would have been enough children with chronic nutritional deficiencies for people to notice that those who were thinner or malnourished tended to hit puberty later. (Amanda is eating dirt while pregnant because she’s low on iron!) I’m sure Janey isn’t the only one who tried it, but she was able to develop a form of an eating disorder that persisted, and her parents were too gentle to do anything but try to coax her into eating more.
Dabney: Tell me about your journey as a writer. What was the first thing you ever wrote for publication?
Jennie: This! I’ve written my entire life, but Gather the Daughters is the only work I seriously tried to publish. I had no idea how complicated it would be. I spent about one and a half years being rejected by everybody I sent my manuscript to. I put Gather the Daughters on the shelf for a few months as unpublishable, before a nagging feeling made me pick it up and start trying again. I lucked out, because the agent and editor I found are incredible.
Dabney: Was this society initially a religious group who left to follow specific practices and incest gradually crept into the mix or did they leave because they wanted to practice incest?
Jennie: That’s a big question, isn’t it? I’m going to digress here, both because the back-story may become a novel of its own and because I haven’t pinned down exactly how it happened. But the question of how societies come to practice acts we consider abhorrent on children is fascinating to me, because I honestly believe that in every society, almost everyone loves their children.
I think first there needs to be a set of beliefs encoded into the society that makes abuse possible. Then there needs to be some belief that the abuse itself is either beneficial for the child or for society as a whole.
As an example, in one society I found mention of, the young boys were sexually abused. The cultural belief was that being a strong warrior was the most important quality in a man. The sexual abuse was thought to increase boys’ strength and virility, thus making them into greater warriors and benefiting both the boys themselves and their society (which I’m assuming experienced frequent conflict.)
I’m no anthropologist, but I believe with these two criteria met, the stage is set for all sorts of abuse to be inflicted on a child- and that it has been, throughout human history. I don’t think these criteria are sufficient- plenty of societies manage not to systematically abuse their children- but I think they are necessary.
A lot of people were frustrated that the women didn’t object more. As is made clear in the novel, there are quite harsh punishments for those who do speak out, but also, in our world, some of the more terrifying childhood abuses- foot-binding, female genital mutilation- are/were performed by women. It’s clear that patriarchy led to these traditions being formed, but women contribute to the continuation of the tradition (again, for the supposed good of the children involved).
Dabney: Did you think specifically about the religious symbolism of Janey and Mary? Janey as the Christ-like sacrifice and Mary as, well, Mary?
Jennie: You’re asking someone who read The Narnia Chronicles twice before a friend pointed out that there was Christian symbolism! I was raised Jewish, and so I am much more familiar with the Old Testament than the New. In fact, I didn’t read the New Testament until well into adulthood (so had the experiencing of reading the New Testament and hearkening back to literature, as opposed to vice versa.) That said, when I had Janey staked out for punishment I thought, okay, there is a little symbolism here! The thing is, I don’t think Janey died for anyone’s sins. It was the collective sins of the island that meant Janey had to die.
As for Mary’s name, it was originally Cassie, and Janey’s chapters were originally from her perspective. My agent suggested I change the name, as Cassie and Caitlin are similar. My brother’s girlfriend is named Mary, and I hadn’t used the name yet, so there it went. Perhaps there was something connecting in the back of my mind, but it wasn’t conscious.
Dabney: I’m curious about the children’ summers…was there something specific you had in mind?
Jennie: A few people compared the summers to the Amish Rumspringa, but I wasn’t thinking of that particularly. I was thinking, here’s all these children, following all these rules, suffering all these abuses, where’s their release? Then I thought, what if they were given a whole season to rebel, in a formalized manner- in a sense, as a strategy of containment? If kids are allowed to run wild enough, does that tame them during their time of restriction? I love the idea of muddy children forming their own summer society, as wild as only children could make it, while the adults are huddling inside, too prim to roll in the mud and go have fun somewhere.
Dabney: Has the national conversations about women’s reproductive autonomy shifted how you view your characters at all?
Jennie: I remember when I saw that picture of that all-male committee meeting to discuss women’s health care coverage, my blood boiled. I thought, you can’t do that without women at the table. To me, it’s just another example of men in power getting together and deciding what to do with women’s bodies. As if we don’t have anything valuable to propose, argue, or champion. It’s a common thread throughout history, and it made me sick to see our country going backwards. I think it made me see my characters as even braver, because they fought against an entrenched system, even when the odds were stacked against them, even at risk to themselves that far outweighs any risks we have for speaking out in our society. I hope I could be that brave, but I kind of doubt it.
Dabney: Is there something you hope readers carry with them after reading Gather the Daughters?
Jennie: It would probably be that even the most oppressed or abused children still have joys and hopes and desires- that they’re still children, and not just the victims of abuse. The light we all love that shines in children continues to shine. When we make them only the passive recipient of abuse, we in a sense dehumanize them. I’m not saying for an instant that abuse doesn’t massively shadow a child’s life, but it doesn’t- at least in my experience- blot that light out.
Dabney: Thanks for talking to me.
Jennie: It was a pleasure.
Buy it at A/iB/BN/K
Jennie Melamed is is a psychiatric nurse practitioner who specializes in working with traumatized children. During her doctoral work at the University of Washington, she investigated anthropological, biological, and cultural aspects of child abuse. She lives in Seattle with her husband and three Shiba Inus.
Friday, July 28, 2017
Interview with Jennie Melamed, author of Gather the Daughters
Please welcome Jennie Melamed to The Qwillery as part of the of the 2017 Debut Author Challenge Interviews. Gather the Daughters was published on July 25th by Little, Brown and Company.
TQ: Welcome to The Qwillery. When and why did you start writing?
Jennie: I’ve been writing as far back as I can remember. I don’t know exactly why I do it, just that not writing isn’t an option for me. I go through periods when I’m writing less, or even not at all, but I always return to it. Gather the Daughters, though, was the first piece where I really persevered trying to get it published.
TQ: Are you a plotter, a pantser or a hybrid?
Jennie: I’d say 70% pantser, 30% plotter. I often know in my head what’s going to happen in terms of broad strokes, but then my characters will run off and do something completely different than I was planning for them. I’m often surprised by what happens when I sit down and write.
TQ: What is the most challenging thing for you about writing?
Jennie: Finding the time. I wrote Gather the Daughters while going to graduate school and working- it was a challenge! Even now, when I only work four days a week, sometimes my three days off fly by as I take care of normal human business, and I can only get an hour or so in of writing. It’s frustrating.
TQ: What has influenced / influences your writing?
Jennie: I read constantly, and I read very quickly. I’ve found that if I stop reading, I actually get depressed in a week or two. I go through phases in what I read- my last was a Victorian literature phase that lasted a year or two. Everything I read influences my writing in some way.
My work also influences my writing. I work with children as a psychiatric nurse practitioner, and I can’t begin to describe some of the chaos and trauma that I witness. I find it comes out in my work, to the point where my agent and editor have to remind me to please lighten up a little bit!
TQ: Describe Gather the Daughters in 140 characters or less.
Jennie: A novel about the daughters of a post-apocalyptic cult at the end of the world.
TQ: Tell us something about Gather the Daughters that is not found in the book description.
Jennie: Gather the Daughters is, in part, a love story. Most people miss it, and so I probably made it too subtle, but two of the main characters are in love and in another world could live happily ever after.
TQ: What inspired you to write Gather the Daughters? What appealed to you about writing a novel with a post-apocalyptic setting?
Jennie: I can’t go into depth without revealing spoilers, but the idea of Gather the Daughters came to me when I was about eighteen, after listening to so many of my friends reveal child abuse in the their past. I began wondering what it would mean for abuse to be encoded into a culture.
When I was a child, I had post-apocalyptic daydreams all the time. Vanessa’s guilt over her own depicts what I consider to be a fairly common child fantasy- that you are the only one left in all the world, and can do whatever you want. I am fascinated by end-of-the-world scenarios in general. I’m not sure exactly what that says about my personality.
TQ: What sort of research did you do for Gather the Daughters?
Jennie: I didn’t do any specifically for Gather the Daughters, but research I did in graduate school made its way into the book. I did some anthropological and sociological investigation into child abuse in other cultures, as well as studying perpetrators of child abuse. It definitely affected what I wrote.
TQ: Please tell us about the cover for Gather the Daughters.
Jennie: The US cover came first. I fell in love with it as soon as I saw it. There is a girl with her eyes closed in a white dress, falling, with the ground vertical instead of horizontal. To me, it depicts the theme of the novel, not any particular scene. The UK cover came next and has the roses, thorns, and mosquitoes, which I think wonderfully contrasts the beauty of the island with the wildness and cruelty it contains.
TQ: In Gather the Daughters who was the easiest character to write and why? The hardest and why?
Jennie: Vanessa was definitely the easiest; she is a smart girl who reads a lot and tries to please her father, just like I was as a child, although she’s definitely more popular than I was!
Janey was probably the hardest, simply because the first drafts did not have Janey as one of the main characters- Janey’s story was told from Mary’s point of view. Eventually my editor suggested that I switch to having Janey’s point of view instead, and it wasn’t too difficult, but I felt a sense of loss leaving Mary’s narrative behind. I have a huge soft spot for Mary, and I think she’s a less complex character with Janey running the narrative. That said, it was definitely the right decision.
TQ: How does isolating the characters on an island affect how they deal with social issues?
Jennie: There is no point of reference. I think we see this in isolated cultures worldwide, although the number of societies this isolated is shrinking. People live in ways we find wrong or even abhorrent, but they have no way to see that it can be different. Or perhaps someone in power knows it can be different, but chooses to withhold this information, for a variety of reasons. I’m not exempting ourselves from this, I’m often amazed at what a product of culture we are, all of us. That’s part of why I think universal child education is so important, just the ability to think critically and question what we do every day is invaluable.
TQ: Which question about Gather the Daughters do you wish someone would ask? Ask it and answer it!
Jennie:
Q: Why did you write such a disturbing book?
A: To me, Gather the Daughters deals with types of violence that happen all the time, under our noses, and unless one has a way to be exposed to it, it happens hidden and unseen. Violence towards children has been happening since there were children, as far as I can tell, simply because children are vulnerable, and there are those who are drawn to abuse the vulnerable. I guess in short, I have a disturbing take on humankind in general. I think we are overall selfish creatures, and sometimes that selfishness leaps over a boundary to translate into the oppression of others. And I think we are so good at fooling ourselves that the majority of those who oppress others feel their actions are right and good. I don’t mean to say that people can’t be kind, altruistic, or compassionate. But I think those attributes often have to be taught and nurtured, whereas the darker instincts arise and have a strength all their own.
TQ: Give us one or two of your favorite non-spoilery quotes from Gather the Daughters.
Jennie:
“She discovers that grief is a liquid. It passes thickly down her throat as she drinks water and pools soggily around her food. It flows through her veins, dark and heavy, and fills the cavities of her bones until they weigh so much she can barely lift her head. It coats her skin like a slick of fat, moving and swirling over her eyes, turning their clear surfaces to dull gray. At night, it rises up from the floor silently until she feels it seep into the bedclothes, lick at her heels and elbows and throat, thrust upward like a rising tide that will drown her in sorrow.”
TQ: What's next?
Jennie: I am at the very beginning of a work that is related to Gather the Daughters. I can’t promise it will flourish into anything, but I really like what I have so far. That’s all I’m going to say!
TQ: Thank you for joining us at The Qwillery.
Jennie: You’re very welcome!
AUTHOR INTERVIEWS
Author Interview with Jennie Melamed
by adminOctober 11, 20171 Comment on Author Interview with Jennie Melamed
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It’s time for an author interview that I’m super excited about!
Jennie Melamed is a psychiatric nurse practitioner who specializes in working with traumatized children. During her doctoral work at the University of Washington, she investigated anthropological, biological, and cultural aspects of child abuse. Her debut novel, Gather the Daughters, was released this past July. The book is set on an island where men reign supreme and girls are forced into marriage once they hit puberty. The girls feel trapped in their lives, and suggestions of an uprising begin to circulate.
You can check out my review of Gather the Daughters or visit Goodreads for a full synopsis!
This blog is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites
What inspired you to write “Gather the Daughters”?
I first got the idea in college, a very long time ago. A lot of my friends were starting to open up about the trauma they had suffered in their childhood. It seemed to me that almost everyone had something- and then I started thinking, what if there was a society where abuse was just part of everyday life? (I didn’t realize back then that this actually has happened multiple times.) The idea occurred to me while I was watching a movie- I can’t remember which one- and I left the theater and went to the computer lab and wrote a short story. The idea knocked around in my head for years, but it wasn’t until I was working with trauma survivors, and reading research, that I began to piece it all together.
Do you have any favorite authors that influenced you to write?
Kazuo Ishiguro, Margaret Atwood, the Brontës, Wilkie Collins, most recently Louise O’Neill… the list goes on and on.
What do you love about the dystopian genre?
I’ve never thought about it, and yet I’ve loved dystopian books since I was a child. Perhaps it’s my dark view of humanity in general; we try to build a perfect society and it always goes incredibly wrong. Things fall apart so easily in very isolated societies, and I’m fascinated by things falling apart.
I also think that in dystopias there’s such great opportunity to depict characters who think and act drastically different than we do, and chances for individuality and heroism to shine through.
What was the hardest part to write in Gather the Daughters? Your favorite part?
Probably anything to do with the new Mr. Adam. Not that I found the character difficult to portray, I just hate him so much, and found it rather awful- but compelling- to write about him.
My favorite part is the rebellion, and the girls on the beach. That just flowed. I wish they could stay there forever.
This is your first novel! How long had you been writing before Gather the Daughters was published?
It took me three years to write the book. Then it took about two years to get an agent. The book sold quickly. A year of editing, then publication was exactly one year after the edits were done. Six years total!
Do you read book reviews? How do you deal with good or bad reviews?
I try to limit myself to reading the good reviews, since reading bad reviews gets me upset and there is rarely constructive criticism in them- although I do appreciate good ideas for improvement when people have them.
Dealing with good reviews is easy! I’m grateful that somebody liked my book and felt the urge to give feedback. I still can’t believe that there are people out there reading and loving my book. It makes me so happy.
When I read a bad review, I get down and disappointed. I try to remember all the good reviews and remind myself that the book I wrote is not a crowd-pleaser. That I’m not sorry for the story I told or the characters I created and loved. That even The Underground Railroad has some one-star reviews- and I am in utter awe of that book and have no idea how anyone could ever dislike it.
I am trying to be philosophical about it. One of my main supports is my friend and next-door neighbor, who is an incredible artist. Her work is breathtaking. She tells me that there are people who don’t like her paintings and criticize them for one thing or another- and she just knows that you can’t please everyone with a creative work. She loves her art and accepts that other people might not love it, and that’s the price of being in a creative industry.
What are your three favorite books of all time?
Oh, that’s such an unfair question! Just three?? I’m going to have to pick them at random from my list of ten or so: Vanity Fair, Jane Eyre, and Call of the Wild.
What do you do in your free time when you aren’t writing?
I run, sail, scuba dive, hike, and play with my dogs. I try to do something writing-related about six hours a week, and I work, so my free time is very limited.
What’s next for you?
I’m currently wading through research for my next novel, which will be a piece of historical fiction. I do want to write a sequel or a prequel to Gather the Daughters at some point.
I want to thank Jennie Melamed for sharing her thoughts with us! If you want to learn more about Jennie Melamed and any upcoming projects, visit her website! You can also follow her on Twitter, Instagram, and visit her Facebook page!
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Carol Swinger
October 11, 2017 at 3:58 pm
Awesome interview. Looking forward to future offerings from this fabulous writer!
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1/14/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Print Marked Items
Melamed, Jennie: GATHER THE
DAUGHTERS
Kirkus Reviews.
(May 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Melamed, Jennie GATHER THE DAUGHTERS Little, Brown (Adult Fiction) $26.00 7, 25 ISBN: 978-0-
316-46365-2
A band of young girls grows to undermine the world they were born into.Vanessa, Amanda, Caitlin, and
Janey live on an island, at an indefinite distance from the U.S. mainland. It's not clear what year it is or
when, exactly, the island was colonized. The girls and their families are all descended from 10 "ancestors"
who founded the island society. The only ones to leave the island are the "wanderers," who travel to the
mainland--the "wastelands"--to bring back supplies. In this world, women and girls live tightly proscribed
lives. Children run riot during the summers, but, once they reach puberty, girls undergo a summer of
"fruition" before they are married and begin breeding. In her debut novel, Melamed, a psychiatric nurse
practitioner, has written a terrifying work of speculative fiction. The customs and rules of her island become
clear only gradually, so the truth of that world seems to blossom, horribly, in the reader's mind. In their own
way, the girls begin to resist their society. To put off puberty, Janey starves herself. Vanessa, whose father is
a wanderer, devours the books he brings back from his travels. Further details would require spoilers.
Suffice it to say the apparently placid surface of their world begins to roil. Melamed is a masterful writer,
and she establishes a hauntingly vivid atmosphere. While it may be difficult at first to differentiate among
her many characters, by the end they each become clear. This is a haunting work in the spirit of The
Handmaid's Tale--but Melamed more than holds her own. Hopefully her debut is a harbinger of more to
come. Fearsome, vivid, and raw: Melamed's work describes a world of indoctrination and revolt.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Melamed, Jennie: GATHER THE DAUGHTERS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491934265/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=48cb3e8a.
Accessed 14 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491934265
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Gather the Daughters
Rebecca Vnuk
Booklist.
113.21 (July 1, 2017): p18.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
* Gather the Daughters.
By Jennie Melamed.
Aug. 2017. 352p. Little, Brown, $26 (9780316463652); e-book, $13.99 (9780316463676).
In Melamed's quietly horrifying debut, 10 men and their families left the "wastelands" behind to start a new
society on a coastal island. Succeeding generations worship these ancestors and follow their rules, which
revolve around gender roles and childrearing. Children are taught nothing of the wastelands except that the
world is burning after an apocalypse and only the chosen Wanderers are allowed to venture back, usually to
bring supplies--and, once every generation or so, a new family. Women are subservient, children run wild
outside for entire summers, and when daughters reach menarche, they spend their summer breeding with the
unmarried males of the island. Once autumn comes, they are married off and follow adult rules: two
children per family, obey the man of the house, and drink a "final draught" once your children bear their
own children. But society starts to fray when four daughters of the newest breeding generation become
rebellious, wanting to know more about the wastelands and desiring more freedom for themselves and other
girls. Melamed's gorgeous writing lets the details of this fundamentalist society drip out slowly. Readers
will find dread washing over them as the story unfolds, and will be left catching their breath when the full
backstory dawns on them. This one belongs on every dystopia reading list.--Rebecca Vnuk
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Vnuk, Rebecca. "Gather the Daughters." Booklist, 1 July 2017, p. 18. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499862683/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=13d737fa.
Accessed 14 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A499862683
1/14/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Gather the Daughters
Publishers Weekly.
264.21 (May 22, 2017): p66.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Gather the Daughters
Jennie Melamed. Little, Brown, $26 (352p)
ISBN 978-0-316-46365-2
Melamed's haunting and powerful debut blazes a fresh path in the tradition of classic dystopian works. In
her searing portrayal of a Utopian society gone wrong, four girls share their stories of life on a sheltered
island where they are ostensibly safe from the war- and disease-torn wastelands that their ancestors had
escaped generations earlier. The darker truths behind their heavily patriarchal society--in which girls must
submit first to their fathers, then to their husbands--emerge over the course of a year marked by a
devastating plague and a quietly assembled rebellion. Led by 17-year-old Janey Solomon, who is holding
her body's development at bay to retain any lingering shreds of adolescent freedom, the island's daughters
begin to ask forbidden questions: Why do so many women mysteriously bleed out in childbirth after
defying the island's traditions? Is there habitable land beyond their shores? Can any of them choose to stray
from their assigned fate? It's a chilling tale of an insular culture grounded in "the art of closing off the world
to those who seek it." Melamed's prose is taut and precise. Her nuanced characters and honest examination
of the crueler sides of human nature establish her as a formidable author in the vein of Shirley Jackson and
Margaret Atwood. (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Gather the Daughters." Publishers Weekly, 22 May 2017, p. 66. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A494099020/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5f5e3eba.
Accessed 14 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A494099020
Gather the Daughters by Jennie Melamed, book review: I doubt it will become a cult classic
This debut novel set in a dystopian future might be a short-term hit for those looking for something to fill 'The Handmaid’s Tale' hole in their life as the TV adaptation draws to a close
Lucy Scholes Wednesday 26 July 2017 11:45 BST1 comment
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Jennie Melamed’s debut novel Gather the Daughters explores the tensions within a small island-based rural community in which traditional gender roles hold sway.
Her characters aren’t Amish, but island life revolves around a twisted take on rumspringa (“running around”), the Amish adolescent rite of passage during which teenagers are exempt from the usual strict rules and encouraged to explore the wider world, before (hopefully) deciding to return to the fold of their own free will and embrace their adult lives.
It’s also considered a good opportunity for courtships. In Melamed’s version, every summer all prepubescent island children old enough to walk take to the woods and the beaches, running wild and feral together until the first autumn frost creeps across the ground. Meanwhile, back at home, those girls who’ve reached their “summer of fruition” (have begun to menstruate) are forced to partake in an orgiastic mating ritual – months of enforced free love (those unwilling are drugged into submission) – before they take a husband and become obedient wives and, if the ancestors see fit to bless them, fruitful mothers.
Similar to The Handmaid’s Tale, Melamed sets her story in a dystopian future where a “scourge” has punished mankind and “defective” births are common. Unlike Atwood’s tale, though, we’re given barely any information regarding life beyond the island, Melamed cleverly keeping us as much in the dark, and thus just as frustrated, as her enquiring adolescent protagonists. The “wanderers” – the men who hold the highest rank in the community – visit “the wastelands” across the waters, telling tales of a “world of fire”, but as the narrative progresses both we and the girls from whose perspectives the story is told, have reason to become increasingly distrustful of what we hear.
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It’s a richly envisioned world, the strange isolation of which Melamed is excellent at teasing out slowly enough to ensure we become progressively more and more unsettled by the community’s rules and rituals. What the girls are put through – “the love that felt... wrong,” as one of them describes it: preteen daughter and father incest is routine, and is so unsavoury it made me question quite what the bigger point of it all was.
Melamed certainly doesn’t revel in titillation, but I had to wonder whether adult human nature really is as perverse, cruel and blindly unquestioning as she seems to believe. She’s much more attuned to her younger protagonists however – occasional clunky dialogue and atonality aside – and excels at manifesting emotion as a something children experience viscerally: silence that “crawled up her ankles, lapped at her knees, enveloped her waist, and then drew itself tightly over her face like a suffocating sheet”, or grief as a liquid that “passes thickly down her throat as she drinks water and pools soggily around her food ... flows through her veins, dark and heavy ... coats her skin like a slick of fat”.
I doubt it’ll become a cult classic, more likely a short-term hit, especially if you’re looking for something to fill The Handmaid’s Tale hole in your life as the TV adaptation draws to a close.
‘Gather the Daughters’ by Jennie Melamed is published by Tinder Press, £18.99
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‘Gather the Daughters’ review: A grim outlook for women in a fictional dystopian world
Originally published July 24, 2017 at 8:13 am Updated July 25, 2017 at 9:13 am
A book that draws on themes not unlike “Lord of the Flies,” “The Lottery” and “The Handmaid’s Tale,” portrays a grim future for women on a fictional island.
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By Ellen Emry Heltzel
Special to The Seattle Times
“Gather the Daughters”
by Jennie Melamed
Little, Brown, $26, 341 pages
Seattle writer Jennie Melamed’s debut novel, “Gather the Daughters,” is an unrelentingly bleak story about a fictional island cult in which being female is such a bad card to draw that the women share a group cry when another of their gender is born.
Incest is sanctioned between fathers and daughters until the girls reach puberty. Then women are expected to become Stepford wives and breeding machines for a society so inbred that the rates of birth defects and, by extension, child mortality have become startlingly high. So-called “defectives,” the elderly and anyone else who is a drag on this insular group are eliminated.
It’s not clear when or where this band of believers first separated itself from the rest of the world, but the story clearly takes place in the present or near future. By conscious choice the cult leaders send out trusted males they call “wanderers” to recruit new members and gather needed goods while shunning modern medicine and other conveniences available to those on the mainland.
Author appearance
Jennie Melamed
The author of “Gather the Daughters” will speak at 7 p.m. July 27 at Elliott Bay Book Co. (elliottbaybook.com or 206-624-6600).
In this closed culture, women are literally beaten into mute acceptance of their lot, or so everyone is led to believe. But after one young woman (Amanda) is reported to have died in childbirth — “bleeding out,” this is called — another (Caitlin) observes her body being pulled from the salty sea, an apparent suicide.
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The news is reported to an older peer (Janey), a 17-year-old who already is resisting the system Gandhi-style, by starving herself to avoid starting her period. With menstruation, a girl faces her “summer of fruition,” in which she roams the island and has random sex before settling down with a life partner and fulfilling her duty to reproduce.
Point of view rotates among a cluster of girls on the verge of womanhood as the fierce, red-haired Janey enlists a crew of rebels. From the start, however, everyone seems to realize that this resistance merely postpones, rather than prevents, their destiny. It seems they can’t imagine the possibility of real escape, anyway. Such is the power of cults or, in this case, male authority figures who have convinced themselves, despite much contrary evidence, that their system works best for everybody.
Melamed’s plot obviously owes a debt to Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” because of its treatment of women, in particular the strict control of their fertility. But William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies” wings by in the form of the wild, sometimes savage summers allowed the youngsters in the cult. The spirit of Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery” might be detected here, too, given the claustrophobic society in which the action takes place.
Melamed, a psychiatric nurse practitioner, has drawn on her professional background to depict the interior lives of girls and women caught in such a brutal, cloistered world. She offers strong and at times poetic images of the natural environment in which her story takes place — terrain that sounds a lot like the islands in Puget Sound.
She is less successful at conjuring the man-made surroundings (homes and church) or, more importantly, the process by which the force field of maternal love, as instinctive as the male sex drive, has been stomped out. Such powerful emotions don’t evaporate overnight.
Ellen Emry Heltzel is a Portland book critic.
The Latest, Troubling Chapter in Feminist Dystopian Fiction
By CLAIRE JARVISOCT. 13, 2017
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GATHER THE DAUGHTERS
By Jennie Melamed
341 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $26.
“She can’t see the point of the repetitiveness of it all, people living to create more people and then dying when they’re useless, to make room for even more people”: 13-year-old Vanessa Adam reflects on the tiny circuit her life is expected to run, and recognizes its futility. What is the point of a life in which every stage is planned in advance, in which there can be no deviation from the norm? “Gather the Daughters,” Jennie Melamed’s debut novel, presents a world in which child abuse has been normalized, even sanctified, and in which the salutary pleasures available to girls and women are few and far between — a world in which girls make a harrowingly quick journey from childhood to motherhood to death.
Vanessa lives on a secluded island where a darkly patriarchal society has settled after fleeing the destruction of a scourge. The ever-present suggestions of the misery and ruin endured in the wastelands beyond the island allow men called wanderers to maintain a rigid social order, their list of “shalt-nots” including things like “Thou shalt not raise more than two children” and “Thou shalt not touch a daughter who has bled until she enters her summer of fruition.” In this blending of repressive regime with dystopian future, “Gather the Daughters” shares a genetic code with Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go” and Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale.” It imagines a world in which reproduction is heavily controlled, and where women and girls must submit — totally — to male authority. To my mind, the central question of “Gather the Daughters” is this: Does the island represent dystopia or utopia? Melamed doesn’t want us to entertain this question, though the structure of the novel demands it. Whose utopian ideal was powerful enough to create this dystopia?
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If we look at this society from the point of view of the girls and women, the novel’s answer is clear. From an early age, girls are subject to the abuse and control of their fathers. Once married, the girls must bear children (a vast number are “defectives” — stillbirths and miscarriages), serve their husbands, and watch as their own daughters are conscripted into girlhoods of abuse. This regime is so obviously, unimpeachably bad that it makes the minuscule numbers of women who eventually resist perplexing, though perhaps this is explained by the sheer endlessness of psychic and sexual abuse.
But what of the men? Few men — if any — willingly resist the island’s abusive regime, despite the sense that this community has existed for multiple generations. More than that, though, the wanderers seem to have little trouble in persuading couples to emigrate to the island. It’s these couples that are most disturbing: The émigré men are presented as clear predators, with wives who are so broken that they can’t fathom the depravity of the island’s rules.
“Gather the Daughters” highlights an increasingly obvious problem with the project of feminist dystopian fiction: How does the genre understand its aesthetic aims when the presentation of suffering — extreme and inhumane — is a necessary part of its political aims? At what point does the depiction of such suffering tip into a pornography of violence? In this case, the novel’s final twist is signaled so far in advance it barely registers as a twist. Even before that moment, Vanessa has a conversation with one of the wastelanders, who has moved to the island with her husband:
“‘So tell me, Vanessa, what advice would you give to someone who’s just moved here?’
“Vanessa stares at her and tries to think of something Mrs. Adam might not have been told. Something every woman knows, but doesn’t usually say. ‘Have sons?’”
These sons end up as ghostly narrative curiosities in Melamed’s novel, bearing no resemblance to the cruel men who lord over the island’s women. Vanessa’s younger brother, Ben, is a sweet, curly-headed 3-year-old. But the novel’s logic insists that Ben, too, must grow up. And if Vanessa’s future is a foregone conclusion, so is his.
Claire Jarvis is a professor of English at Stanford University and the author of “Exquisite Masochism: Marriage, Sex, and the Novel Form.”
A version of this review appears in print on October 15, 2017, on Page BR18 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Let Me Go. Today's Paper|Subscribe
Debut novel 'Daughters' recycles 'Handmaid's Tale'
Zlati Meyer, USA TODAY Published 3:03 p.m. ET July 25, 2017 | Updated 3:04 p.m. ET July 25, 2017
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Dystopian stories about women are all the rage right now, thanks to Hulu.
While Gather the Daughters (Little, Brown, 352 pp., ** out of four stars) clearly was in the works long before the series based on Canadian author Margaret Atwood’s classic novel The Handmaid’s Tale made the country gaga over Gilead, it’s riding the wave of the show’s popularity.
But it wipes out. Daughters is derivative at best and a faded photocopy at worst.
Jennie Melamed’s debut novel is about a religious commune cloistered on an island that was settled generations earlier by 10 male founders who escaped what the commune calls "the wastelands."
The commune eschews modern technology and conveniences, though the wanderers, a handful of men who travel by ferry back to the larger world, occasionally return with mementos, such as a book called Cubist Picasso, and medicine.
For the island dwellers, life is a biblical horror show set amid a violent patriarchal society that uses a calendar tied to agricultural rites for obscure reasons and enforces super-strict sex rules.
The boudoir mores are hardly by the book — the Good one or otherwise. They include incest, orgies, what amounts to forced marriages and treating women as baby-making machines.
The island's children get a reprieve every summer, when they run wild outdoors 24/7. For the young girls who lend their rotating points of views to each chapter, the warm weather becomes bittersweet as they get closer to adolescence, the time when they must find husbands. Those that get too uppity face harsh punishments.
Author Jennie Melamed.
Author Jennie Melamed. (Photo: Jennifer Boyle)
Occasionally, converts move to the island — an effort to refresh the gene pool, because of all the inbreeding. The newcomers have strict instructions not to discuss their old lives in the wastelands, but sometimes, tidbits leak out, opening naive eyes to the fact that young girls shouldn't be sleeping with their fathers.
There are some glimmers of hope for the characters, like the wonderful bonds of female friendship and the young women’s desire to feed their natural human instincts for fairness and justice. However, these are offset by a cold view of miscarriages, called defectives; a brutal whipping scene; and a morbid “Ring Around the Rosie” reboot: “One-two-three-four-five-six-seven/Drink a draft and go to heaven/Grandmother can’t. Grandmother won’t/Push that poison down her throat!”
When one young girl sees something she shouldn’t — a violent act perpetrated by, you guessed it, men — life on the island goes to hell.
The fact that the author is a psychiatric nurse practitioner who specializes in working with traumatized children makes the goings-on in Daughters disturbing.
But Melamed's plot suggests some real storytelling chops. Crafting a new society with its own bizarre rules is a big undertaking and the writing is fast-paced. You get a feel for what the girls face and how they strain against the island dogma to find their own voices and freedom. Whether they succeed, Melamed never tells us.
Gather the Daughters works as a light — yet dark — beach read, but you might find yourself looking for a tongue-less ferryman (don’t ask) to take you from the sand back to the real world.
The end of the world, again
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Some Kind of Ending
by Conon Parks
Paul Constant
September 05, 2017
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Every dystopia needs a gimmick — some hook to distinguish it from the ever-expanding constellation of literary post-apocalypses. Seattle writer Jennie Melamed’s Gather the Daughters is a dystopian novel that remixes several pre-existing gimmicks into one. Melamed’s influences are right there in a blurb on the front cover of the book, as written by Helene Wecker, who calls it “An heir to the creations of Margaret Atwood and Shirley Jackson.” That’s about as succinct an observation as you can fit in a front-cover blurb. Gather the Daughters travels in a straight line through Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Jackson’s “The Lottery,” taking note of elements with a magpie’s eye as it proceeds.
Daughters takes place on an island off the coast of a ruined civilization. It’s been fairly stable for most of recent memory. An elite team of wanderers occasionally travel to the mainland, to pick up useful goods from the supposedly burned world. Every couple on the island is permitted two children, and boys are heavily favored over girls. Women are tolerated solely for their breeding capabilities; in marriage they are property, and once they pass child-rearing age they commit suicide. The dust-jacket plot synopsis of Daughters isn’t really enough to distinguish it from all the other doomsday scenarios clotting up bookshelves.
But Daughters has a secret weapon. Dystopias are especially useful literary tools because they help dominant social groups empathize with the day-to-day experiences of minority groups. (I’m far from the first person to point out that the indignities suffered by the white protagonists of most dystopias have almost all been suffered by minorities at some point in the history of the world.) Melamed, a nurse practitioner whose bio identifies her chosen field as “working with traumatized children,” is using her dystopia to speak out on behalf of abused girls, and she does it masterfully.
The protagonists of Daughters are all young women and girls. They’re subject to the whims of the men in power, including a pastor who preaches that…
When a daughter submits to her father’s will, when a wife submits to her husband, when a woman is a helper to a man, we are worshipping the ancestors and their vision. Our ancestors sit at the feet of the Creator, and as their hearts are warmed, they in turn warm His. These women worship the ancestors with each right action, with each right intention.
They follow commandments like “Thou shalt not allow women who are not sister, daughter, or mother to gather without a man to guide them.” It’s always been that way, girls are told, and society balances precariously on their ability to shut up and bow to the men. Of course, as in any dystopian novel, the girls eventually stand up to the men, and they are punished for it. Eventually, the marks of their punishment become status symbols:
Marks from the beatings become badges of honor. The girls compare injuries, competing for the deepest-black bruise, the grisliest swellings, the most blood dried to crackling brown on their faces…Helen, with two immobile fingers swollen like sausages, walks with her hand held before her like it was draped in ostentatious jewelry, making sure the girls see the damage thrust in front of them. Fiona, with her iridescent face, is envied and admired, and she walks around, tilting her head up toward the sun, so her skin glows in navy and violet and gold.
The way that Melamed writes about violence and abuse is different than, say, the way Margaret Atwood handles it in The Handmaid’s Tale. Melamed’s accounts of violence feel more personal, gorier, aligned on a spectrum. The girls in Daughters are forced to choose between multiple kinds of abuse; the only control they really exercise over their fates is to choose the man who will force the most tolerable kind of violence on their bodies.
Daughters is worth reading for the perspective that Melamed delivers to the genre. I’ve never before read a dystopian fiction that was an extended analogy for an abusive relationship, and the analogy works quite well. But, still, it must be noted that Donald Trump’s presidency has sapped the dystopian fiction genre of its apocalyptic luster. The genre feels old, exhausted, and Melamed’s first novel too easily follows the well-worn plot structures that have been mapped out by the thousands of books that came before.
I hope Melamed continues to write novels about this subject matter. Her understanding of the psychology of abuse and recovery is masterful, and you get the sense that at the end of Daughters, she has much more to say. But when I read this early passage about a barely tolerated library on the island, I felt as though Melamed was unveiling her potential as a writer:
As in Father’s books, the names of the publication locations are exciting and impossible to pronounce. Philadelphia, Albuquerque, Quebec, Seattle. The students have made up stories about what these places were like before they all became the wastelands. Philadelphia had tall buildings of gold that shone in the sun; Albuquerque was a forest always on fire; Quebec had such cold summers that children froze to death in seconds if they went outside; Seattle was under the sea and sent books up to land via metal tunnels.
I want to read books about those cities. Leave dystopia behind and tell me stories about undersea kingdoms and gleaming skyscrapers in parallel universes that are better than our own. We don’t need to see a world as twisted as ours in order to trigger our empathy; maybe it’s time to see what a better universe could bring out in us.
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Books in this review:
Gather the Daughters
by Jennie Melamed
Little, Brown
July 24, 2017
352 pages
Purchased by SRoB
Buy on IndieBound
About the writer
Paul is a co-founder of The Seattle Review of Books. He has written for The Progressive, Newsweek, Re/Code, the Utne Reader, the New York Observer, and many North American alternative weeklies. Paul has worked in the book business for two decades, starting as a bookseller (originally at Borders Books and Music, then at Boston’s grand old Brattle Bookshop and Seattle’s own Elliott Bay Book Company) and then becoming a literary critic. Formerly the books editor for the Stranger, Paul is now a fellow at Civic Ventures, a public policy incubator based out of Seattle.
Follow Paul Constant on Twitter: @paulconstant
Gather the Daughters by Jennie Melamed review – a misogynist dystopia
The influence of The Handmaid’s Tale is clear – but this is a skilful novel full of suspense
Jennie Melamed: convincing portrayal of the discomforts of low-tech life on a small island.
Jennie Melamed: convincing portrayal of the discomforts of low-tech life on a small island. Photograph: Jennifer Boyle/Headline
Sarah Moss
Sat 12 Aug 2017 03.59 EDT Last modified on Wed 29 Nov 2017 04.19 EST
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Gather the Daughters is set in the alternative reality of a misogynist dystopia. On an island just out of sight of “the Wastelands” (the mainland, or the rest of the world), the descendants of 10 families live in a closed community with no technology later than pen and paper, no money and some disturbing sexual practices.
The island is ruled by “the Wanderers”, a group of elite adult men who make regular trips to the Wastelands, returning with a small selection of useful commodities to eke out the produce of small-scale subsistence farming. Other men follow the kinds of trades one might find in a small medieval town: blacksmithing, weaving and carpentry (though the population is so limited that when the papermaker dies, the islanders simply run out of paper). The women stay at home, contriving what they can by way of food, clothing and cleanliness with limited resources. They divert themselves with gossip and attendance at each other’s childbirths, these being the only occasions on which they may gather without a male chaperone.
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Everyone must marry, girls after the “summer of fruition” following their first periods, boys at the end of adolescence. Partly as a means of population control, after the births of two healthy children fathers are expected to have sex with their pre-pubescent daughters, although forbidden to do so with girls of reproductive age. “Defective” babies, whose numbers are increasing because of the small gene pool, are killed at birth.
Women who produce more than three “defectives” are dismissed to make way for second wives. After becoming grandparents, usually in their late 30s or early 40s, people “drink the last draught”, to free jobs and houses for the coming generations.
Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale has had many imitators, and nothing about Jennie Melamed’s setting is particularly inventive, but characterisation is strong and the focus on the leadership and strategic skills of pubescent girls is refreshing. The narrative moves between three girls and one woman, and each has a distinctive voice, character and family background developed in a way that makes her personality plausible and likable.
There is Vanessa, clever daughter of a Wanderer father who allows her access to the large library he has brought from the Wastelands; Caitlin, whose drunkard father beats her and her mother so much that even the islanders disapprove; Janey, resisting puberty and forced marriage through self-starvation, which has postponed her menarche past her 17th birthday; and a supporting cast of young female friends and followers.
The island’s children, harshly disciplined into unvarying routine for the rest of the year, are allowed to run free and live wild all summer, and one year, under Janey’s leadership, the wildness persists underground and fuels a rebellion that threatens the island’s social order and pushes the Wanderers into increasing brutality.
Narrative tension builds as skilful characterisation fills the reader with growing concern for the central voices. The discomforts of low-tech life on a small island that is icy in winter and infested by mosquitoes in summer are convincingly portrayed, and the world built from the detail of coarse, worn-out clothes and beautifully made domestic interiors is believable.
There is a tendency towards distractingly overblown descriptions of landscape and people: Janey notices the “dulcet, garnet gleam in each strand” of her sister’s hair, while “the sky arcs gracefully above them in washes of blue, the dense, pillowy clouds pearlescent and peach-toned along their bulging bellies …”.
Melamed manages scenes of sexual abuse and beatings without prurience, sharing with the reader the strong coping strategies of girls who never conceive of themselves as victims, and also insists that even in a society where all men are rapists, very few are without love and care for the women closest to them.
This is not an unusual novel, but it is a strong example of its kind. And an account of what happens to the rising generation when islanders decide to cut themselves off from the neighbouring mainland to pursue a fantasy of conservatism may be of particular interest to British readers this summer.
• Sarah Moss’s latest novel is The Tidal Zone (Granta).
Gather the Daughters is published by Tinder. To order a copy for £16.14 (RRP £18.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.