⭐️ 3.25

Ironically, the final page describes an art critic reviewing Regan’s painting and saying “visually pleasing if a bit lacking in narrative clarity or substance,” and that is exactly how I feel about this book.

This had the potential to be better. I was hooked at the beginning and found myself really enjoying it because of the interesting narration going on with all the intervening figures, though this ended up completely misleading the direction the story was going in and feeling gimmicky when it disappeared later on. I found this to be a waste of a compellingly experimental and almost cinematic narrative scheme that I think could have really elevated the book overall and help it come to full fruition, but alas.

I also found myself at times not really caring about what was going on from losing interest in the plot (so I do feel the book should’ve been at least 50-60 pages shorter), which is majorly due to the development of a repetitive nature that happened around the middle, the story going over and over and over the same themes—again, bordering on redundancy—with a frustrating tell-not-show narrative that can be glimpsed occasionally, especially towards the end; many-a-page are dedicated to delineating the same meditations on time and bees and their mutual fear of the other’s abandonment, concepts which of course centre their dialogue and make it feel like they were having the same conversations over and over again. (I repeatedly found that we were circling the same points but not really getting anywhere, particularly regarding Regan’s bipolar capriciousness.)

This may have been deliberate—a stylistic choice meant for the sake of development and evolution of the aforementioned themes at play—and even done well at times, but not consistently so. The change in the writing style towards the end, also deliberate, amounts to a very unsatisfying read: practically zero dialogue and endless paragraphs that don’t really add anything new. For this, it definitely did need to be shorter and more concise, IMHO.

At the core of this book is a much needed critique of the ways in which (primarily white cisgender heterosexual) male bias is seen as the default in Western society - or “impartial common sense”, as the author puts it. Indeed, there were a couple of silver linings to this book. These include a sharp discussion of meritocracy as a faulty man-made concept and, more broadly, the author’s clear passion for the topic.

Unfortunately, that is where the positives end for me. The most glaring issue (as other reviews have pointed out - shoutout @crybabybea) is the complete erasure of gender diversity, alongside the implicit promotion of gender essentialism and traditional gender roles throughout the book.

Frankly, not acknowledging gender beyond ‘traditional man/woman’ in a book about gender bias does an absolute disservice to its core message. I certainly wasn’t expecting a comprehensive discussion of how each argument presented applied to trans and gender non-conforming individuals, but the fact that there wasn’t so much as a disclaimer regarding this limitation is baffling. At one point, the author rants against the idea that gender inclusion in research is “too complicated” while… simultaneously excluding gender diversity? At that point, I have to assume the omission is intentional.

In the final sections of the book, the author acknowledges that it is gender, rather than biological sex, that determines the erasure and mistreatment of women. Nonetheless, she manages to consistently conflate sex and gender throughout the book. This includes a passage in this same section, in which she sarcastically apologises “on behalf of the female sex” - which one is it, Caroline!?

Overall, I’d give this one a miss unless you’re interested in reading about this topic from a uniquely cishet Western neoliberal lens 🤷🏻‍♀️

I feel like these characters are going to stay with me forever