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The Gate to Women’s Country is a standalone science fiction novel by Sheri Tepper. This was my first time reading anything she had written.

The story is set on earth, long after an apocalyptic event known as the “convulsions��. Most of the pre-convulsion technology was wiped out. In their society, women do most of the work for maintaining their communities, learning the sciences and the arts and the skills necessary for survival. The men mostly serve as warriors, living apart from the women, with some exceptions among men who have chosen to remain with the women as servitors. The story primarily follows Stavia, alternating between a timeline starting when she’s 37 and a timeline starting when she’s 10. The younger timeline gets the most page time, and takes Stavia into her early 20’s as she deals with life and begins to learn some of the secrets of the society she lives in.

I liked this. I put it down easily, but I enjoyed it when I picked it back up. There’s a lot of depth to the world-building here, and a lot of meat to chew on. There are a lot of gray areas with the society portrayed in this book. I could understand how and why the people made the choices they did to create their society, but I also thought it had a lot of flaws and found myself debating whether the benefits were worth those flaws.

The characters were as nuanced as the world-building, and I cared quite a bit about what happened to Stavia. Having the two timelines split up did remove some of the suspense about what would happen to Stavia whenever she was in danger in the earlier timeline, but the story from the earlier timeline was interesting enough despite that and it had plenty of other revelations to offer.

The story was satisfying as it is, but there was also enough depth to the world that I felt there could have been other interesting stories to tell in the same setting. I might have chosen to read them if they existed. I also have the author’s book Grass on my Kindle, so I look forward to getting around to that one someday.

The Kindle edition I read has a lot of random italics that don’t belong there. That got a little exasperating. I kept catching myself reading a sentence with odd emphasis because of the incorrect italics, then I’d compulsively re-read it without the emphasis so it didn’t sound so ridiculous.