I think this might be one of those cases where the book wasn't necessarily bad, it just wasn't for me. I will still do my best to explain why I didn't like this as much as I expected to, so I can spare you a long, at times grueling read if you think you might feel similarly.

A lot of people seem to really love this, and reading through positive reviews I can understand why, so I will also start with the positives. This book has some well-worded insights about existing as a woman in a god-forsaken patriarchal society who mostly sees women as caretakers and incubators. It also has some very emotionally charged scenes that I think were done skillfully and convincingly.

The first part is much stronger than the second one, and if the book had ended there I would have probably given it 3-3.5 stars. But, unfortunately, it didn't, and the second part was a bit of a mess. I will also mention that, although overall much better in terms of pacing, characters, etc., the first part included a very weird scene with trans/homophobic rhetoric that definitely threw me off and made me distance myself emotionally from the MC, which affected the rest of my reading experience. If you want to know more details about that, you can see my forum post about it here. I almost DNFd, but other users told me there weren't any other similar scenes so I kept reading.

In the second part, the pacing was off. We spend most of it on a debate on artificial insemination through sperm donation which reads more like a lecture than a work of literature. The same arguments and POVs kept being repeated over and over. Halfway through this I upped my audiobook speed to x1.75 to keep me from DNFing, which I almost never do. Also, for most of the second part, it felt like the characters became mouthpieces for the author's thoughts, opinions and internal debates. Every character that wasn't the MC was in the story for this purpose and it felt very clumsily done.

The ending of part two was good, but the whole thing would have needed a lot more editing. And not only because of the issues I already mentioned, but also because this novel tried to touch on way too many themes. I won't list them here to avoid spoilers, but believe me, there were many, and it made the second part feel very disjointed. Or well, 50% of it was the single theme I already mentioned, and the rest of the very rushed themes were crammed into the other half.

The last thing I'll say is that I did not love how the descriptions of other women by the MC were always very focused on their appearance. This is a very minor complaint compared with everything else but, for a feminist book, the women were described much more harshly than the men.

So, yeah, I didn't love this one. But I do believe a lot of the issues were due to bad editing (or lack of editing?) in the second half, so I would be open to reading something else by the author, because there were still some interesting tidbits and discussions.

Anyway, this review ended up being much longer than I expected. I'm glad I can move on to my next read now.

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