Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend-the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore. When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. Stunningly original and altogether arresting.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. These women are illiterate and therefore incapable of recording their thoughts without his sympathetic assistance. It’s true that the narrator is a man, but that’s of necessity. This surely is not the first time that these women are thinking for themselves, but it might be the first time they are questioning the male-dominated system that endangered them and their children, and it is clearly the first time they are working through the practical ramifications of what they know and what they truly believe. Shocked by the abuse they have endured at the hands of the men to whom they are supposed to entrust not only their bodies, but also their souls, these women embark on a conversation that encompasses all the big questions of Christian theology and Western philosophy-a ladies-only Council of Nicea, Plato’s Symposium with instant coffee instead of wine. The youngest form an almost indistinguishable dyad, but the others emerge from the formlessness their culture tries to enforce through behavior, dress, and hairstyle as real and vividly compelling characters.

The cast of characters is small, confined to two families, but it includes teenage girls and grandmothers and an assortment of women in between. The title means what it says: This novel is an account of two days of discussion, and it is riveting and revelatory. While the rest of the men are away in the city, arranging for bail, a group of women gather to decide how they will live after this monstrous betrayal. It’s only when one woman, Salome, attacks the accused that outside authorities are called-for the men’s protection. Then they learn that, in fact, they have been drugged and raped repeatedly by men of the colony. At first, they assumed that, in their weakness, they were attracting demons to their beds. For a period of years, almost all the women and girls have awakened to find themselves bloodied and bruised, with no memories of what might have happened in the night. The Molotschna Colony is a fundamentalist Mennonite community in South America. An exquisite critique of patriarchal culture from the author of All My Puny Sorrows (2014).

Miriam toews books