future home of the living god book review

The Handmaid’s Tale is more thorough and explicit about what the end product world looks like, whereas Future Home of the Living God leaves a lot to the imagination.

Okay, I know your next question is “How does this book compare to The Handmaid’s Tale?” Here are some answers, broken down by category. It contributes to a claustrophobic uncertainty - with a limited notion of what kind of present Cedar’s living in, we’re even more terrified about the future these characters will face. Certainly the details we see of Cedar’s world are fragmented, but number one, it’s literary so I didn’t come here for the worldbuilding SORRY LITERARY FICTION BUT SFF IS BETTER AT THIS THAN YOU, and B of all, the worldbuilding is fragmented because Cedar’s access to information is fragmented. That is the case with Future Home of the Living God, and one criticism I’ve read of it is that Erdrich doesn’t spend enough time on worldbuilding. So it is not yet fallen apart, a la The Hunger Games. Process dystopia refers to the kind of dystopian story where the world is in the process of falling apart. Remember when I invented the term process dystopia like a damn genius? Well it has come in handy a fair few times, and every time I read a book that fits that definition, I am like:

If anyone sees a pregnant woman out in public, they are required to inform on them, which means that Cedar’s movements are strictly curtailed. As she’s wrestling with all of this, the country has begun to change at an ever-increasing pace, with pregnant women being called in to give birth in government-controlled centers. She visits her biological Ojibwe family to inquire about any potential medical issues, but has yet to tell her adoptive Minnesota liberal parents that she’s expecting. But you can see that this is my own error.Ĭedar Songmaker is pregnant at a time when evolution has begun to run backward. I didn’t go into Louise Erdrich’s latest novel Future Home of the Living God with the expectation that it would leave me so anxious about The Future that I had to read half of Archer’s Goon just to get myself to sleep.

Future home of the living god book review