Review – The Seawomen by Chloe Timms
I doubt I can add very much more to the many other complementary reviews that have been written about The Seawomen. My conclusion is, it is a mesmerising, atmospheric book that draws you in, even though you know it will be a painful read, illustrating misogyny, patriarchy and hatred of anything other.
Non conformity is abhorred and violently driven out
A couple of pages in and the oppression is obvious. The Untethering is an awful ceremony which all females are meant to attend and learn from or more appropriately be in fear of and compliant
It’s a husband’s job to send the wife out to sea for the final time. The wife bears the blame, when fertility is a joint responsibility.
But some men are unlucky, my grandmother explained, some marry godless woman after godless woman and never have any children. They have to come to the jetty several times and send each of their wives out to sea.
Mull showed me a thin white strike of lightning on her shin. A fall from a long time ago. One of her brothers, so disgusted that his mother, the wife of the man who spoke for God, had broken her string of sons by giving birth to a daughter that he pushed Mull down the stairs.
The terribleness of this is the matter of fact nature of the story told. A man, no boy had the right to do this to a smaller child because she was a girl. You can’t be sicken by this anymore, only saddened by the damage wrought on the community by this terrible doctrine.
How you choose to live or survive in that environment when you are a unique individual with thoughts that do not adhere to the consensus is challenging
How can it be about choice? None of us have a choice. All of us do things we don’t want to do. We shut our eyes and turn our heads and pray to God; we marry and we lie under men just to live another day.’ I heard her take another shaky, tearful breath. We turn away from watching the torment of girls we know have done nothing, because we know that if we don’t, we’ll be next’
Every natural event, happenstance can and is blamed on the presence and evil nature of Seawomen to pollute the good
The Seawomen is a book that resonates, demonstrating the challenge of living through the lives of a few freethinkers on an isolated island. I am impressed with the slow start which built up to a satisfying end.
