This captivating novel is Alice Martin's first, and it is an alternative history set in 1973. Martin deftly brings the seventies alive, albeit with some changes, but mostly the way women were treated back then. There is a plague that only affects women between the ages of twelve and fifty. The symptoms include tiredness, scratching like crazy, memory loss, and an urgent need to go westward. When these women are infected, they leave their families, homes, and lives to go west. A few of these women who make it to the West Coast walk into the ocean and die. Others find their symptoms going away and either go home or start a new life. Most of the younger women are placed in hospitals and sedated while scientists study the phenomenon and keep them from going west, and for their own good. There is a man named The Piper, who has a bus and intends to take the women west. But he has his own agenda.
Martin uses the viewpoint of three women to tell the story. Aimee has just graduated from college only to find that her best friend, Ginny, is infected and has left home. Aimee dreams of what has happened to the westward women and feels a great need to rescue her friend. She sets out from Pennsylvania, stealing her mother's car and cash from her father, and heads out to find the Piper because she believes Ginny may be on the bus. Eve, a journalist, leaves North Carolina to dig deeper into the stories of the westward women. She once went after a story about a cult that she was lied to about, and her career as a reporter was over. Now, she needs to find something no one else has on the westward women to prove to the men that she still has it. She believes that finding the Piper will be that key to the story. Teenie is a woman on The Piper's bus. To get on the bus, you must turn over any money you have, which goes toward food and gas. When the Piper runs out of money, they find work on farms and such.
Martin has been compared to Joyce Carol Oates and Margarette Atwood with good reason. Her book centers on the role of women's lives at that time and how their absence is affecting the United States. Some counties have curfews for women, but not for the men. Some people treat them as second-class citizens and refuse to have anything to do with them, while others take advantage of them, and yet the younger men and women welcome them, fascinated by the stories they hear. This fascinating look at life in the seventies for women will ensnare you on the first page. I can't wait to see what else Martin has to offer.
Quotes
She knew, distantly, that everyone turned to dust eventually. But at least people like Ginny wore themselves out running.
Alice Martin (Westward Women p, 34)
Were these things still real if Aimee was the only one who remembered them? Had Aimee’s whole life with Ginny even happened if Ginny didn’t remember it too?
Alice Martin (Westward Women p, 60)
And maybe I was wrong before I was sick. Maybe friendship doesn’t have to mean giving or taking anything. Maybe it can just mean sitting beside someone in silence.
Alice Martin (Westward Women p, 118)
Aimee felt an ache so familiar it felt almost like nostalgia.
Alice Martin (Westward Women p, 133)
In that moment, in a flash, Eve knew she had to leave them. It might take her a few years to be ready, but even then, she knew it would happen. Because she knew that this was the only time she and her mother would ever find any tenderness between them. At an unreachable height, surveying a world that looked flat but wasn’t.
Alice Martin (Westward Women p, 137)
It was always easier to talk to men when they were sources than women. Women could see past her beauty, her attention. Women were suspicious, careful readers.
Alice Martin (Westward Women p, 180)
That had always been Eve’s problem, she realized now. She wanted flirtation to last forever: the thrill of it, the freedom of it, the refusal to have to choose any one thing or person. To be on the edge and never go over. But flirtation couldn’t last forever. People in love chose each other, settled down, stopped looking for more. And that wasn’t for Eve.
Alice Martin (Westward Women p, 244)
She left because she no longer remembered what it looked like to stay.
Alice Martin (Westward Women p, 284)
Link to ThriftBooks:https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/westward-women/55254987/?resultid=f0c4694e-6ed4-4ba5-afea-083a104a3a40#edition=73118276&idiq=89429675
No comments:
Post a Comment