Helpful Score: 1
This was very much a breakthrough book when it was first published in 1975.
First, it was written by a woman writer, using her real (and recognizably female) name; second there's nary a rocket ship in sight; third, it deals with feminism at its 70s-era angriest; and fourth, it tosses most narrative traditions right out the window.
Obviously, it's not everyone's cup of tea. Some of it is dated. Some of it remains insightful and bitterly funny. And some of it attempts to shock with its frank sexuality -- and in these days of just-about-anything-goes, that may be where it shows its age the most.
The story, such as it is, wanders between three characters (and an occasional ephemeral, unnamed fourth) -- Jeannine, whose Earth never emerged from the Great Depression but which also never underwent WWII; Joanna, whose world is very much like our own; and Janet, whose world is not only vastly different than ours, but is also several millennia ahead of "our" timeline. There's a slight nod to the notion of diverging realities, in which each action splits off an entirely new future and which therefore allows the story to sneak in under the edges of the science fiction tent -- a tent which had been considerably enlarged in the preceding decade.
There is a vague plotline of sorts that emerges almost at the end of the novel, without which the entire book would be but a thin veneer over a feminist polemic pointing out how repressed, exploited, and psychologically abused women were at the hands of those beastly males.
At this remove, the novel verges on becoming an historical oddity -- angry and literate but flawed by its over-reliance on style over substance.
First, it was written by a woman writer, using her real (and recognizably female) name; second there's nary a rocket ship in sight; third, it deals with feminism at its 70s-era angriest; and fourth, it tosses most narrative traditions right out the window.
Obviously, it's not everyone's cup of tea. Some of it is dated. Some of it remains insightful and bitterly funny. And some of it attempts to shock with its frank sexuality -- and in these days of just-about-anything-goes, that may be where it shows its age the most.
The story, such as it is, wanders between three characters (and an occasional ephemeral, unnamed fourth) -- Jeannine, whose Earth never emerged from the Great Depression but which also never underwent WWII; Joanna, whose world is very much like our own; and Janet, whose world is not only vastly different than ours, but is also several millennia ahead of "our" timeline. There's a slight nod to the notion of diverging realities, in which each action splits off an entirely new future and which therefore allows the story to sneak in under the edges of the science fiction tent -- a tent which had been considerably enlarged in the preceding decade.
There is a vague plotline of sorts that emerges almost at the end of the novel, without which the entire book would be but a thin veneer over a feminist polemic pointing out how repressed, exploited, and psychologically abused women were at the hands of those beastly males.
At this remove, the novel verges on becoming an historical oddity -- angry and literate but flawed by its over-reliance on style over substance.
