Women Talking by Miriam Toews

 genre: contemporary fiction

In a hayloft in a secluded Mennonite community, a group of women gather to make a choice.  Will they continue to be violated and abused by staying in their homes among the men who perpetrated these crimes, will they fight for their children and try create a better, safer world or will they flee and leave behind the only home they've ever known.  It's an almost impossible choice, but for these women, young and old, the status quo doesn't really feel like a true option any more.  A tiny light is flickering and these women, talking together, are going to craft it into a flame.

This book has flooded me with so many thoughts and feelings.  It is horrendous, atrocious, beyond horrible what these women have experienced. The fact that it is based on REAL events makes it ten times worse.  So one part of me is so horrified by the behavior of people who feel they have a sick kind of power that I want to look away.  But our author forces us to LOOK.  LOOK at what people can endure and then imagine how the powerless might go about taking their power back.  And that leads to another part of me that cannot get over the beauty of these women talking, the way they are slowly finding themselves as they say the words to describe what is indescribable.  I had to have a pen at the ready to underline the ways in which ideas about forgiveness and violence and power structures and patriarchy and pain are so perfectly and simply stated.  I loved the narrative structure of the novel, in which the minutes of the women's meetings are written down by an outsider, who also has their own commentary on what's happening.

I can't imagine I will ever forget how powerful this book has been to me.  It touched a deep part that is beginning to find so much solace in reading about women finding their voices, even among the basest abominations. I am giving every kind of content warning for a book discussing this kind of trauma - but also, if you can bring yourself to look in the eye of the horrors that real women have and will experience, I truly urge you to do so.