A Gentle Tyranny (Nede Rising Series)

This book is what you would get if you combined the gender-segregated society of Sheri S. Tepper's The Gate to Women's Country with the capital extravagnce and high stakes competition of Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games. Which is to say that this book is more than a little derivative. Is it still worth reading? Yes.

Corban takes the ideas behind these two books and runs with them, adding in descriptions of the jungle setting that are beyond lush. Reina's naivete at the beginning of the book was troublesome to me, but Corban places her in situations that force her confront her own lack of knowledge and gives her the motivation to overcome it. Reina's growth is realistic and believable in a way that many authors can't pull off. And we show more learn that her ignorance isn't entirely due to her sheltered upbringing or her own passivity. There are things in her society that are just not talked about, and which will probably turn out to be its downfall. We'll have to wait for the sequel to find out, though. show less

Have you ever seen a book with a title that seems so cool and then you open it and it's utterly depressing?

In a weird way that shows Christians don't understand anything, at least the one who wrote this one, this book depicts what they think feminism is. According to this author feminism is eventually overtaking all men and anything with a drop of masculinity. And then sterilizing them and treating them in a way that is built off of real racist history.

Gynecology as well as experimental sterilization has been done upon countless people of color and multiple races, we only know so much about gynecology because we experimented on African-American women. Not one, not a couple, but thousands. Everything that is in this book can be traced show more back to how we treated people of other races, but turned upon the poor, defenseless, mistreated white people.

Even if I wanted to distract myself from the fact this is Christian propaganda, this isn't a book like Narnia where I can read it and pull away from religion and enjoy it. The religion is shoved down your throat from the first couple pages. You are being fed propaganda hardcore down your throat by this book and it doesn't let up.

I don't even feel like I need to go into this long description about why this book is homophobic, transphobic, etc. They use so much stuff like there's only two genders male and female -that's gender not sex. And then they use multiple situations that are extremely racist. In fact I don't even want to go over all of the transphobic and homophobic scenes so I'm just going to slap the racist card down and elaborate a little bit more, but I definitely don't want to go back over this book and take pieces out and type them up and disgust whoever is reading this review.

With a title like Gentle Tyranny you would think that this book would be some kind of speaking piece that would actually go political or another direction, definitely probably not the direction that my taste would go into. But even if this had been something like The Shack. Which is another book that I'm not fond of, but after experiencing this book I can safely say that I would rather read that one with its implications knowing that it was written for everyone including non-religious people.

So take every bit of history you might know dear reader, and flip it then make it so the white people experience that instead of the people of color the people who lived on this land before white people came, and everyone else hurt by the white people. To see history turned and applied to the aggressor really disgust me, and all the situations depicted in this book it was almost always a white person being the one who did it, and now it's a white person it's done to.

In the end a part of my brain could not turn off the fact that they call the castrated men who cannot and the sterilized men "gentles". It came off sounding too much like gentile and I could not unhear it. It felt like a blatantly offensive use of somebody's history as well as somebody's culture but turned so the white man was the victim. Even if this supposed crazy christian feminist propaganda idea was to enact it would never get this far, and even lesbians know that men are useful for reproductive purposes so to remove all reproduction in men is to kill oneself and their future. But this book treats woman like they're so stupid that they would castrate every man and never have babies. Like artificial insemination can be used eternally when it can't. And there was also this great part where some of them weren't fixed but they were instead removed of all their testosterone, and supposedly no testosterone made them more kind which is very confusing and also not entirely how it works. So basically white men are being experimented on how past races have been. Especially children.

Feminists don't hate men.
Feminist don't think men are only good for making babies.
Feminism wants equal rights for everyone.
Why is this so hard to understand?

I was repulsed by how any religion that wasn't Christianity was shut down and treated like a cult when Christianity and itself often has colts to the point that there are many churches that are found to harbor cults. Not all Christians are evil, but there is a problem among religion that needs to be worked on. This isn't progress.

Edit: Forgot "gentling" is from both Wheel of Time, and Sword of Truth. You wanna tell me something about your poor understanding of bad females in power equalling feminism, Jess? These two things are so different. I'm even more disgusted now that I realize that.

0 stars but it's not possible to rate that so 0.5 stars. show less