If you are a fan of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaiden’s Tale or Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God, then you’ll probably be a fan of this short book by Hugo and Nebula award winning author Sarah Gailey, Upright Women Wanted. The tag line is what got me: Are You a Coward or Are you a Librarian? The story follows Esther, a young woman running from her father’s household to join the Librarians, women who apparently are “sanctioned” to ride from town to town delivering “Approved Materials.” Of course, the librarians, and Esther herself, are not what they seem, and maybe not what they should be.
Amazon’s description of a book that “reinvents the pulp Western with an explicitly antifascist, near-future story of queer identity” is actually a perfect way of describing this book. It is filled with delightful turns-of-phrase, expert world building that is never heavy-handed and yet paints an exact and evocative picture, and carefully drawn characters. It harkens to nearly every sort of worst-case, State-run, post-apocalyptic novel you might think of and yet it in no way seems like an imitation of anything out there. Rather, Upright Women Wanted seems to remind us that the warnings of Atwood and Erdrich, and indeed in as far-flung books as 1984 and The Hunger Games, are still present. Gailey has deftly put the reader into the shoes of the exact type of person to be hurt by our current climate of extremism, and it will resonate in your bones like the sound of a rattler in the desert.
If you like this book, also check out:
The Handmaiden’s Tale by Maragret Atwood
Red Clocks by Leni Zumas
Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich
Once and Future by Cori McCarthy and AmyRose Capetta