This is the sequel to Walk to the End of the World, but is a very different book in approach and structure. Whereas the first book is clearly divided into different viewpoints - mainly of male characters - this is more organically told from different women's POVs, including Alldera, the woman from the first volume.

At the end of the first volume, Alldera escaped from the nightmare of the Holdfast in the middle of a civil war. As this volume opens she is wandering the forbidding country beyond. She is pregnant from having to 'service' her various masters, and this imperils her already precarious survival. But strange footprints lead her to a food cache. In the hope of catching up with the monsters who made the tracks, before the food runs out, she follows and finds monsters indeed - with two heads: one human. Only at the last moment does she realise they are human beings riding animals (for there were no animals in the Holdfast, not even domestic ones), and that the 'men' riding them, who she anticipates will kill her, are actually women.

These Riding Women take her into their community and nurse her so that her child is born healthy. They are the descendants of women who were genetically engineered to have a double set of DNA in their ova, for reasons that don't entirely make sense, but possibly were intended to create a set of well understood experimental subjects with little genetic drift. The scientists who worked on their development ensured that they can conceive - parthenogenesis, found in nature in species such as the aphid - by their ova being triggered into dividing and eventually becoming clones of themselves. Implausibly, those scientists ensured this could be done only in the presence of horse semen, which leads to an 'inevitable' conclusion and a 'sex with horse ceremony' scene where the young women are 'mated' with young colts while lying in a contraption to hopefully allow them to survive the experience. A lot of readers might find this risible or repulsive. It certainly wasn't the only method that could have been employed, but is part of the ambivalent bond that the women have with their horses. Ambivalent, because the women also routinely kill their horses for meat.

The various tribes of women consists of an extended web of connections, with identical mothers and daughters of different ages spread out between the tribes. They depend on their horses which they have bred for toughness, especially the mares, and live in harmony with the environment. Crucially however, this is no paradise: apart from the raiding between groups which sometimes lead to deaths or injuries, and the predations of a vicious creature which sounds like a genetically engineered rat, there are tensions among the women, sometimes resulting in feuds where they injure or kill each other. However, to some extent, they make allowances for their mutual flaws as they know the traits of each 'Motherline'. In a sense, everyone is predictable, which is not the case with Alldera or the 'free fems' a population of escaped fems from the Holdfast who trade with the women and live in an uneasy accord with them. Alldera had always believed the 'free fems' to be a myth. Her original mission in the Holdfast had been to escape and find them to ask for their help in freeing their fellow captives, but by the time she does meet them, she discovers that they are full of talk rather than practical help.

The main hardship of Riding Woman existence is that when the grass wears thin due to the rains coming late, they have to slaughter horses, and Alldera witnesses this in a graphic scene. This notion leads to a rather silly scene when a wild mare she has tamed is killed: although the women don't truly understand the genetic basis of their creation, surely they would realise it would be better to breed from this mare to introduce some needed variation into their herds? Anyway, this aspect will probably put some readers off.

Alldera finds it hard to fit into such a close knit community where only her daughter will be truly accepted - because the sharemothers - the group of women who 'adopted' them both - have all breastfed the child in the hope she will somehow develop their trait. The sharemothers care for the baby, while Alldera remains ambivalent: she had had two daughters in the Holdfast but both had been taken from her as usual and left to fend for themselves in the 'kit pit' so she has never been in daily contact with a child. Among the Riding Women, once children can run about they raise themselves in a 'child pack', so her daughter disappears into the group of wild children soon enough, only to emerge at puberty.

Alldera eventually leaves to join the 'free fems'. To her disappointment, she discovers they have not matured mentally or emotionally from the enforced infantile behaviour of their previous existence. All the fems kowtow to one individual in particular, and Alldera is disgusted by their petty jealousy, pilfering and sometimes vicious rivalries, finding herself an outcast here too. Their talk of returning to the Holdfast to overcome any male survivors and to free any surviving fems is just futile talk. She draws their hostility by running by herself and staying out of their feuds, and also because she didn't bring her child with her - their numbers are finite and will decrease as they die off, since no fems have escaped from the Holdfast since she did.

Eventually, she makes her way back to the Riding Women after overcoming a crisis of confidence, but by then, other fems have seen the attraction of learning to ride a horse as she does and using weapons, and the dream of returning becomes much more of a reality. By the end of the story, the fems have toughened up and lost most of the traits that beset them. They have won grudging acceptance by the Riding Women and Alldera has become their de facto leader.

The story in this book is much more involved with the characters than in volume one which concentrated on a lot of info dumping about the men's society and how it had arisen. This time there are no chunks of info-dumping. Instead, we gradually learn about the various communities through the personalities of different women and their POVs, and the story is much more involving. Therefore for me it earns a 4-star, with the warning that there are scenes of violence towards animals and also sexual scenes which may upset some readers. As a minor note, the cover of this edition is extremely misleading - at no time do any women lead another woman around by the neck and none of the characters wear clothes the slightest bit like those in the illustration either! ( )

This novel is intense, and at times very strange, but also beautiful and insightful. Human communities finding hope and meaning in a post-apocalyptic world - which is cliched in a way, but Charnas doesn't handle these themes in a way that is typical at all. ( )

I read this book as a teenager. It made quite an impression on me. It was one of my favorite books from that time. ( )

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2237380.html

Motherlines takes a lot of Walk to the End of the World and inverts it - we switch from a male to a female central character, and discover that a lot of what had been presented as unchallengeable fact in the first volume is in fact very different looked at from the other side of the gender divide. In addition, the actual plot has some very impressive twists and turns in what is still a very short book.

Motherlines is really excellent, and though Walk to the End of the World is not quite as good you enjoy the second much more for having read the first. And neither is very long. ( )

Interesting concept, mediocre execution...not least because it's more of a pity party than an Amazon camp...occasionally almost interesting, but it's mostly just foppish, untaut writing; the prose is mostly kinda wierd and stupid. The characters are basically flat, boring, and unsympathetic, and that's a real drag--also, the plot is pretty cluttered with lots of petty jealousy, stupid bickering, and useless in-fighting that's difficult to care about. ("Daya licked her lips nervously. 'Maybe Emla had done it. Clever bitch. Maybe because she was annoyed with me over the bracelet.' ") On the plus side, some (but not all) of the world-building was good, and so I wanted to like it because of that, and so I suppose there was the odd moment of reprieve, here and there, from the general..unimaginativeness.

Although the only real feeling I developed towards Alldera-the-supposed-heroine was a feeling of resentment for her condenscending (feminist) attitude towards Daya, the so-called "pet". (She snubbed her, and called it friendship.)

And all the other little traces of woman-hating in the book--"fems"? wft is that?--really gets grating and infuriating after awhile. The hypocrisy of it all, you know...

And you know what? I fucking hate this book. That's right: I honestly fucking hate it. And I mean it.

Learn to have a little fun, bitch, one way or the other.

(4/10) ( )