Book Review: I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman

Posted in Book Reviews by Lisa @ Bookshelf Fantasies

Title: I Who Have Never Known Men
Author: Jacqueline Harpman
Publisher: Transit Books
Publication date: 1995
Length: 173 pages
Genre: Speculative fiction
Source: Purchased
Rating:

Deep underground, forty women live imprisoned in a cage. Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only a vague recollection of their lives before.

As the burn of electric light merges day into night and numberless years pass, a young girl—the fortieth prisoner—sits alone and outcast in the corner. Soon she will show herself to be the key to the others’ escape and survival in the strange world that awaits them above ground.

Jacqueline Harpman was born in Etterbeek, Belgium, in 1929, and fled to Casablanca with her family during WWII. Informed by her background as a psychoanalyst and her youth in exile, I Who Have Never Known Men is a haunting, heartbreaking post-apocalyptic novel of female friendship and intimacy, and the lengths people will go to maintain their humanity in the face of devastation. Back in print for the first time since 1997, Harpman’s modern classic is an important addition to the growing canon of feminist speculative literature.

Published in 1995, I Who Have Never Known Men came roaring back in recent years as a BookTok sensation. After hearing the buzz from so many sources, I finally decided to check it out for myself.

In this strange, moving, puzzling work of speculative fiction, our unnamed narrator introduces us to a harsh new world. As the story opens, she is one of forty women locked in a cage in an underground bunker, watched constantly by a rotating set of male guards who patrol outside the cage, armed with whips. They do not interact with the prisoners, using the whips to threaten if the women break rules, such as touching, hiding, or expressing strong emotions. The women have been there for years, and have only vague memories of a life before or how they ended up in the cage.

But our narrator is different. Caged as a child, she knows nothing of any other life. The women share stories of families, husbands, homes… but she has no understanding of what these concepts are. As she enters her teen years, she holds herself apart, but eventually learns to count her heartbeats as a way of making sense of the unknowable passage of time. When the routine finally breaks and the guards flee, she’s able to secure the key that will allow them out of the bunker… but the world they find above is not what they expect.

The women are finally free, but for what? They find themselves on a vast plain, with no other people anywhere within sight. Out in the open, but with no direction or answers, they must fend for themselves and find a way to survive yet another type of existence they have no understanding of.

She wondered when it had dawned on us that we were as much prisoners out in the open as we had been behind bars.

The narrator tells the women’s stories through her own unique voice, mostly devoid of emotion, keen to find sense in the vast nothingness, connected to but never quite understanding her companions. As years and then decades pass, the women forge a community together, surviving their isolated existence in a world devoid of other living beings.

What has happened to lead to this point? Where are they? What became of all the other people? Why are there no animals or seasons? Why are there so many bunkers and cages identical to the one they escaped? And why are these bunkers the only buildings they’ve ever found in all their years of wandering?

If you pick up I Who Have Never Known Men expecting answers… well, this isn’t that sort of book. The narrator makes it clear early on that she’s lived a long, strange life, that she’s the last one left, and that she’ll never truly know what happened to the world that came before. This is the only life she knows or remembers. Readers go along with her and the other women as they journey over the course of many years. The narrator’s inner thoughts provide an odd sort of focus, centering this existence through the perspective of someone who begins as a clean slate and finds purpose, skills, and perseverance through sheer stubbornness and an innate sense of curiosity, a desire to learn and understand.

While described as a work of feminist speculative fiction, I don’t know that I’d stick with that label completely. The story’s focus is about the women, first as prisoners and then through the experiences they have once they achieve freedom. And yet, this doesn’t fit the mold of many works of dystopian fiction, in which women are oppressed by a misogynistic, authoritarian society. We really have no idea why the women are in a cage — but as we learn later, the cages aren’t exclusively for women. As this group of women travel and find bunker after bunker, they find many that had once held forty men as prisoners as well. (The cages always hold forty people. Why forty? Yet another unknown.) The reason for the bunkers isn’t necessarily related to misogyny — we get the impression that there was a total collapse of civilization, perhaps war or some other sort of disaster. But I suppose the fact that what we focus on is how this group of women survivors chooses to live and move forward is where the feminist fiction categorization applies. I don’t have a problem with that — it’s just that the book was definitely not what I expected it to be.

That’s a good thing, actually. It’s nice to have expectations turned upside down. Starting a book with no real idea of where it will go and feeling totally immersed along the way is one of the joys of reading, after all. I Who Have Never Known Men is a short book — under 200 pages — that contains powerful language and imagery on every page.

A note on the reading experience: There are no chapter breaks, or even section breaks. This is one long unbroken narrative, as the narrator — approaching the end of her life — thinks back on the earliest days she remembers, already in the cage, and tells the story of everything she’s experienced since then. Being inside her head is a unique, unsettling experience. Yes, I prefer my books to have chapters! But once I got into the rhythm of this story, it moved so quickly that I was willing to just go with it.

I recommend checking out I Who Have Never Known Men. It’s definitely not like anything else I’ve read lately. Thought-provoking and disquieting, this is a book that will stay with you long after reading the final pages.

For more about this book, check out this essay from The New Yorker and this article from The Guardian. More about the book’s resurgence thanks to social media buzz:
Medium
The Cut

Purchase links: Amazon – Audible audiobook – Bookshop.org – Libro.fm
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18Jun2025

Book Review: What Kind of Paradise by Janelle Brown

Posted in Book Reviews by Lisa @ Bookshelf Fantasies

Title: What Kind of Paradise
Author: Janelle Brown
Publisher: Random House
Publication date: June 3, 2025
Length: 368 pages
Genre: Thriller/historical fiction
Source: Review copy courtesy of the publisher via NetGalley
Rating:

A teenage girl breaks free from her father’s world of isolation in this exhilarating novel of family, identity, and the power we have to shape our own destinies—from the New York Times bestselling author of Pretty Things and Watch Me Disappear

The first thing you have to understand is that my father was my entire world.

Growing up in an isolated cabin in Montana in the mid-1990s, Jane knows only the world that she and her father live in: the woodstove that heats their home, the vegetable garden where they try to eke out a subsistence existence, the books of nineteenth-century philosophy that her father gives her to read in lieu of going to school. Her father is elusive about their pasts, giving Jane little beyond the facts that they once lived in the Bay Area and that her mother died in a car accident, the crash propelling him to move Jane off the grid to raise her in a Thoreau-like utopia.

As Jane becomes a teenager she starts pushing against the boundaries of her restricted world. She begs to accompany her father on his occasional trips away from the cabin. But when Jane realizes that her devotion to her father has made her an accomplice to a horrific crime, she flees Montana to the only place she knows to look for answers about her mysterious past, and her mother’s death: San Francisco. It is a city in the midst of a seismic change, where her quest to understand herself will force her to reckon with both the possibilities and the perils of the fledgling Internet, and where she will come to question everything she values.

In this sweeping, suspenseful novel from bestselling author Janelle Brown, we see a young woman on a quest to understand how we come to know ourselves. It is a bold and unforgettable story about parents and children; nature and technology; innocence and knowledge; the losses of our past and our dreams for the future.

TL;DR: What if the Unabomber had a daughter?

In this thriller by Janelle Brown, set during the early days of the Silicon Valley internet boom, an increasingly unhinged father steals his young daughter away to live in an isolated cabin in Montana. There, he drills her on philosophy, teaches her to hunt and farm, and conducts evacuation practices through secret tunnels. Above all, he raises her to embrace his own world view:

“Companionship is a crutch. Learning to be alone is the most critical life skill of all — haven’t I taught you that? Because when you rely on other people, for emotional support or intellectual engagement or entertainment or just survival, you are weak. You are vulnerable. Because it means that you will suffer when it’s taken away — and it inevitably will be. You should never rely on anyone.”

From the age of four, Jane’s life is contained within the walls of the cabin and the surrounding forests, and centers on her father. He’s her teacher and protector, and as she grows, he trains her to follow in his footsteps, indoctrinating her on his anti-technology theories, and eventually, involving her in creating his manifesto and in his quest to rid the world of advanced tech, which he sees as dooming the human race.

Jane believes whole-heartedly in her father — for a while. But as she grows up, she has the opportunity to access a TV, and later, the internet (after her father brings her a how-to guide for HTML and instructs her to create a website for his manifesto). As she gains access to the outside world, she begins to wonder whether her faith in her father is flawed, whether his teachings are correct, and whether she’s actually more of a prisoner than someone being protected.

After her father involves her in an act of violence, she flees — but the world outside her cabin is dangerous and baffling, and Jane is forced into difficult situations and hard decisions. Meanwhile, through Jane’s experiences, we see the rise of tech in its glory days, filled with hope and inspiration as well as dire warnings about the destruction of humanity.

What Kind of Paradise is fascinating on both the personal and global levels. Jane herself is an immediately sympathetic character. When she parrots her father’s teachings, we know it’s because that’s all she knows and has been taught. When she takes ill-advised actions, we know that she has no idea what the consequences might be. Due to her extremely sheltered upbringing, she doesn’t see red flags where most others might, and misses essential clues and warnings that could potentially save her from disasters.

The book offers an insightful look into the competing mindsets during the early days of the internet boom. On the one hand, tech gurus speak rapturously about the upcoming changes:

An economic boom due to new technological breakthroughs will enable everyone to join the middle class, so that there are no more working poor. The proliferation of new media will allow truth to disseminate in new ways through new voices bringing an end to widespread ignorance. A rise of liberalism due to a connected global citizenry will usher in the New Enlightenment and the end of fascism and authoritarianism.

On the other hand, we have the doomsday prophecies of Jane’s father, warning that human reliance on machines and computers will spell the end of civilization as we know it:

The world today has lost its mind, and it can all be traced back to the rise of technology. The consequence of the ever-forward march of “progress” has been a society whose citizens are greatly suffering and aren’t even aware of it. The more we continue to replace a life of value with “virtual” life, the less satisfaction we derive from our existence, resulting in a world in which citizens are anesthetized by pharmaceuticals and entertainment living entirely in their heads rather in in a tangible, physical world.

Beyond the philosophical considerations, What Kind of Paradise is a tightly constructed thriller that keeps character-driven perspectives at the heart of the narrative. Yes, a crime is being unraveled, but it’s really Jane’s journey that drives the story and pulls the reader in.

Drawing from the real-life terror of the Unabomber and the ensuing manhunt, What Kind of Paradise has a ripped-from-the-headlines feel, while also expanding the actual story in a compelling direction. What if the bomber didn’t live a life of complete isolation? What if there was a child involved? How would the child of such a person develop and learn? The action and character-driven elements of this story combine to provide a compelling, thoughtful, and high-adrenaline read.

Purchase links: Amazon – Bookshop.org
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