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Book Reviewed by:Based on real events and told through the "minutes" of the women's all-female symposium, Toews's masterful novel uses wry, politically engaged humor to relate this tale of women claiming their own power to decide.
One evening, eight Mennonite women climb into a hay loft to conduct a secret meeting. For the past two years, each of these women, and more than a hundred other girls in their colony, has been repeatedly violated in the night by demons coming to punish them for their sins. Now that the women have learned they were in fact drugged and attacked by a group of men from their own community, they are determined to protect themselves and their daughters from future harm.
While the men of the colony are off in the city, attempting to raise enough money to bail out the rapists and bring them home, these women - all illiterate, without any knowledge of the world outside their community and unable even to speak the language of the country they live in - have very little time to make a choice: Should they stay in the only world they've ever known or should they dare to escape?
The conversation among the women is riveting, philosophical, and even occasionally funny, as they consistently argue with one another like siblings (which some of them are.) It is profoundly deep and often emotionally meaningful. Despite the odd setting, the women are relatable, particularly from a feminist perspective; what woman hasn't felt like her humanity is in question at some point or another, or been asked to forgive something inexcusable so as not to rock the boat? Dramatic specifics aside, these are universal issues and Toews' considers them with depth and remarkable clarity...continued
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(Reviewed by Lisa Butts).
Miriam Toews' novel Women Talking is inspired by events that took place in Manitoba Colony, a Mennonite community in eastern Bolivia with a population of about 2,000. From 2005-2009, hundreds of girls and women were drugged and raped during the night, which religious leadership claimed was the work of God or the devil, punishing them for their sins. In reality, a group of eight men from the community were using an anesthetic made for cattle on the women and attacking them while they were unconscious, night after night, often assaulting multiple women in a single home before moving on. In 2011, these eight men, ranging from ages 20 to 48 were convicted of sexual assault; seven of them were sentenced to 25 years, and the eighth, deemed an ...
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If you liked Women Talking, try these:
by Erika Krouse
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Part memoir and part literary true crime, Tell Me Everything is the mesmerizing story of a landmark sexual assault investigation and the female private investigator who helped crack it open.
by Miriam Toews
Published 2023
From the bestselling author of Women Talking and All My Puny Sorrows, a compassionate, darkly humorous, and deeply wise new novel about three generations of women.
Margaret Atwood, on Twitter
This amazing, sad, shocking, but touching novel, based on a real-life event, could be right out of The Handmaid's Tale.
