Review by Booklist Review
From powerful priestesses to witchy convents, Eleven Percent vividly portrays a women-dominated world that is unrecognizable but also uncannily familiar in its depiction of gendered disenfranchisement. Danish author Uthaug's first novel to be translated into English follows four characters working to fulfil their roles in this rigid, defensive, but also mystical society--one that protects women from the dangers of testosterone by only keeping 11 percent of males alive for reproductive purposes. With innovative world building, such as rooting Christianity to a matriarchal faith, and provocative discussions about women's sexual pleasure, Uthaug's narrative skillfully balances religious, philosophical, realist, and scientific tones--not only bringing this shocking world alive but also the complex emotions of its inhabitants. A refreshing highlight of Eleven Percent is indeed its open treatment of sexual organs and processes, including menstruation and masturbation, to reclaim women's sexuality. Emotionally enthralling and intellectually stimulating, Eleven Percent unpacks the connection between power and fear, exploring how gendered othering creates an insatiable curiosity about those who are othered as well as about one's own nature.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Uthaug, who is of Norwegian, Sami, and Danish descent, makes her English-language debut with a provocative dystopian tale of a world dominated by women, where biological males are kept sedated in spa centers and allowed to exist only for the purpose of procreation and women's pleasure. The novel alternates among the viewpoints of four women. There's Medea, a witch living in a small convent who keeps venomous snakes for elixirs and is secretly raising a male child she took in as an infant. Her lover, Christian priestess Wicca, uses Medea's snakes in salvation rituals. Silence, a member of Medea's convent, atones for her long-ago betrayal of a friend, while Eva, who works at one of the spa centers, harbors her own secret. After Medea's boy, now seven, flees from the convent, the four women search for him, and Uthaug reveals the surprising connections between them. The speculative elements are peppered with bizarre and lurid details, such as an underclass of sex-worker "manladies" who sew toy penises onto their bodies, but readers will be immersed in this world by the time the satisfying conclusion rolls around. It's an intriguing thought experiment about the consequences of gender oppression. (Apr.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A female-dominated future offers its own problems in Danish author Uthaug's provocative novel. Uthaug's first novel to be published in English imagines a time several centuries in the future when 11% of men--enough to keep the genetic pool sufficiently varied--are allowed to survive infancy, only to be kept captive and heavily medicated. Definitely not for the squeamish, the novel follows four women who have trouble dealing with the system in which they have been raised. Medea and Silence are witches who live in a convent with an elderly "sister" and a nameless 7-year-old boy they have raised in secret. Wicca--Medea's lover and a priest in the now-matriarchal Christian church, in which cobras play a critical role--worries that she won't satisfy the mothers who have raised her to follow in their footsteps as priests. And Eva is a doctor with a potentially damning secret she's held since childhood. Though it's not clear whether the rest of the world has also been transformed, or just Denmark and its Scandinavian neighbors, Uthaug builds her brave new world with care and confidence, gradually revealing a civilization in which all new buildings must be round or ovoid, testosterone is viewed as poison, "manladies" with silicone penises service customers in the dodgier parts of Copenhagen, and self-designated Amazons are assigned to teach the captive males their varied sexual "jobs." Uthaug's worldbuilding is more convincing than her plot-making, which tends to long, repetitive flashbacks and little forward momentum, and her frequent, colorful descriptions of the use of bodily effluvia of all sorts to make cakes and other delicacies may leave readers without an appetite. She certainly can't be faulted for subtlety. A funhouse mirror revealing the drawbacks of turning patriarchy upside down. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
