The Book of Etta (Road to Nowhere Series #2)

by Meg Elison

Overview

A Philip K. Dick Award nominee.

In a devastated world, one woman undertakes a desperate journey to rescue the future.

Etta comes from Nowhere, a village of survivors of the great plague that wiped away the world that was. In the world that is, women are scarce and childbearing is dangerous…yet desperately necessary for humankind’s future. Mothers and midwives are sacred, but Etta has a different calling. As a scavenger. Loyal to the village but living on her own terms, Etta roams the desolate territory beyond: salvaging useful relics of the ruined past and braving the threat of brutal slave traders, who are seeking women and girls to sell and subjugate.

When slavers seize those she loves, Etta vows to release and avenge them. But her mission will lead her to the stronghold of the Lion—a tyrant who dominates the innocent with terror and violence. There, with no allies and few weapons besides her wits and will, she will risk both body and spirit not only to save lives but also to liberate a new world’s destiny.

The Book of Etta is the sequel to the Philip K. Dick Award–winning novel The Book of the Unnamed Midwife.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781503941823
Publisher:	Amazon Publishing
Publication date:	02/21/2017
Series:	Road to Nowhere Series , #2
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	314
Sales rank:	299,071
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Meg Elison is a high school dropout and a graduate of UC Berkeley. Her debut novel, The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, won the 2014 Philip K. Dick Award. Its sequel, The Book of Etta, is the second novel in the Road to Nowhere trilogy. The author lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and writes like she’s running out of time.

Editorial Reviews

★ 12/05/2016
In this gritty sequel to her Philip K. Dick Award–winning The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, Elison returns to her postapocalyptic American Midwest milieu, but far in the future, when the midwife protagonist of the first novel is largely a legend. The plague that destroyed human civilization lingers, killing women in childbirth, fetuses in the womb, and newborns. Far more boys survive than girls. The various pocket communities that have survived have found their own ways of coping with the gender imbalance. In matriarchal Nowhere, women collect men into “hives.” In nearby Jeff City, castrati live as women, giving the illusion of gender balance. In Estiel, formerly St. Louis, a monstrous dictator known as the Lion raids other communities for their women and girls. Etta—or Eddy, as he calls himself outside the confines of Nowhere—is a young transgender man who can’t find a place for himself in a world where people with wombs are classified as either baby-making machines or midwives. He’s a wanderer and explorer by nature and has no interest in any other role. Elison continues to startle her readers with unexpected gender permutations and fascinating relationships worked out in front of a convincingly detailed landscape. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

2019-04-17
The follow-up to The Book of the Unnamed Midwife (2014), set in a broken U.S. decades after a pandemic has killed most of the population.

In the town of Nowhere, women essentially have two life paths: They can try to bear a child (an enterprise which frequently kills both mother and baby) or train as Midwives and help other women. But Etta has rejected both possibilities: Instead, she is a raider, traveling outside the town to battle slavers and rescue girls and young women from their clutches. But what no one in Nowhere knows is that Etta does more than simply dress as a man when she leaves town: She actually takes on a male persona, calling himself Eddy. Unable to face the restrictions of being Etta, desperate to realize himself more fully as Eddy and find someone who will love his true self, Eddy makes various journeys away from home on his self-imposed rescue missions, interacting with several societies that each has a different way of dealing with the realities that biological men significantly outnumber biological women and children are a rarity. Eventually, although he tries desperately to avoid it, Eddy will be forced to revisit the one place he really doesn't want to go: Estiel (the former St. Louis), the city controlled by the vicious warlord known as the Lion and the place of a devastating past trauma. Eddy is a fascinatingly complex character, shifting back and forth between female and male identities. His personal journey toward self-realization is made more difficult by the rigidity of his viewpoints about gender, love, and what values cannot be compromised, even for survival in a fairly brutal landscape. That inflexibility, plus his rape as a teenager and his strong preference for biological women, makes it impossible for him to accept the love of Flora, a transwoman and former sex slave, even though she accepts and understands him more than anyone else. Sadly, that rejection helps to hasten the plot's devastating climax and is a realistic portrayal of how one's own struggles don't necessarily instill an immediate empathy for others' situations.

Pulls no punches.

Kirkus Reviews