I enjoyed this more than I thought I would. I didn't see the ending coming, and that's rare for me. Having grown up in an Evangelical church, and then later joined the Mormon church as an adult, a lot of her ideology really brought back a lot of memories about my own past. Had I made a different decision when I was 19, I very easily would have ended up like Natalie, only without the wealthy in laws. Because of that, I actually empathised more with Natalie than I think most readers do. When you're told your whole life that this is what you'll be, why would you do anything else? Even though her mother was progressive and let her go to Harvard (which would have been unthinkable in the church I grew up, women only ever went to Christian colleges or local community colleges), Natalie was still heavily shaped by her mother's ideals. She figured things out the only way she was taught to. Deep down she knew that a degree from Harvard would have been useless for her, and also would have possibly led to ostracism by her conservative community when she graduated if she'd stayed. She clearly wasn't ready or prepared to break free from her religion, because it was the safe option. For the first bit of her married life, she made the best decisions she could from the options she had. I think all too often leftists like to look at women like this and decry them as evil, without truly understanding the deep indoctrination women in particular are put through in these types of churches. Yes they uphold the patriarchy, but for many of them, there's no other option, because they've never been presented with another option -- or if they were, they were lied to about it & were taught it was something to be feared. So they continue to uphold the patriarchy because that's what keeps them safe. I don't know the authors background, but I don't think she came from one of these churches, because if she had, I think there would have been more emphasis on the brainwashing that these women go through. It's not just the lack of formal education, they're taught things like thought terminating phrases (which Natalie does a couple of times, but not with any consistency). "Trust god's plan* "just have faith" are major ones, but they teach you specific phrases for every single possible thing in life, so you stop questioning anything in your own mind. Caleb would have been the one teaching these things in the pioneer timeline, and she never shows that. My family left the church I grew up in over 20 years ago & my mother still struggles with these thoughts to this day. There's no real mention of them going to church or hearing the preacher speak, and that's kind of odd for the subject matter of this book. It's a good book, but it does sort of lean too far to the side of mocking these women for me.

This was a well written & very intriguing story. There were some things that were mentioned that I wondered how the MC would have known about it -- for example, she referenced Shakespeare & Don Quixote in a way that implied she'd read them, but the only books she ever found were in the bunker & were about astronautics. I assume the other women told her about them, but she doesn't say that, so it felt a little odd. There were a couple of things like that that felt a little odd, like how would she have known that (like how did she come to understand what a bus is?), but overall, the story was very compelling.

I think what struck me the most is the lack of men (duh). The lack of a male gaze, the complete lack of violence against the women (only the memories that were described to MC by the women, but even those weren't instances of sexual violence). In a lot of dystopian novels, there's always some element of sexual violence against women, and it's truly just exhausting at this point. It really makes the world the women escaped into even more intriguing. The fact that they were kept healthy & fed was also quite odd, & I'm going to be thinking about this for days. I'm a sucker for a book that makes me just ponder it for days.