Gather the daughters :

Material Type	Library	Call Number	Item Barcode	Location
Book	Searching... Andover - Memorial Hall Library	FICTION MELAMED	31330008303533	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Groton Public Library	FIC MELAMED	37003701890122	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Lawrence Public Library	FIC MEL	31549004609250	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Littleton - Reuben Hoar Library	F MELAMED	39965002078821	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Merrimac Public Library	F MEL	32125001218954	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Methuen - Nevins Memorial Library	SF MEL	31548003103299	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Middleton - Flint Public Library	F MELAMED	32126001542203	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Newburyport Public Library	FIC MELAMED J	32128003561348	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... North Reading - Flint Memorial Library	FIC MELAMED, J.	31550002246525	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Rockport Public Library	FIC MELAMED	32129002224854	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Salisbury Public Library	FIC MELAMED	32131000785704	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Westford - J.V. Fletcher Library	F MELAMED	31990004643669	Searching... Unknown

Never Let Me Go meets The Giver in this haunting debut about a cult on an isolated island, where nothing is as it seems.

Years ago, just before the country was incinerated to wasteland, ten men and their families colonized an island off the coast. They built a radical society of ancestor worship, controlled breeding, and the strict rationing of knowledge and history. Only the Wanderers -- chosen male descendants of the original ten -- are allowed to cross to the wastelands, where they scavenge for detritus among the still-smoldering fires.

The daughters of these men are wives-in-training. At the first sign of puberty, they face their Summer of Fruition, a ritualistic season that drags them from adolescence to matrimony. They have children, who have children, and when they are no longer useful, they take their final draught and die. But in the summer, the younger children reign supreme. With the adults indoors and the pubescent in Fruition, the children live wildly -- they fight over food and shelter, free of their fathers' hands and their mothers' despair. And it is at the end of one summer that little Caitlin Jacob sees something so horrifying, so contradictory to the laws of the island, that she must share it with the others.

Born leader Janey Solomon steps up to seek the truth. At seventeen years old, Janey is so unwilling to become a woman, she is slowly starving herself to death. Trying urgently now to unravel the mysteries of the island and what lies beyond, before her own demise, she attempts to lead an uprising of the girls that may be their undoing.

Gather the Daughters is a smoldering debut; dark and energetic, compulsively readable, Melamed's novel announces her as an unforgettable new voice in fiction.

Reviews (5)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Melamed's haunting and powerful debut blazes a fresh path in the tradition of classic dystopian works. In her searing portrayal of a utopian society gone wrong, four girls share their stories of life on a sheltered island where they are ostensibly safe from the war- and disease-torn wastelands that their ancestors had escaped generations earlier. The darker truths behind their heavily patriarchal society-in which girls must submit first to their fathers, then to their husbands-emerge over the course of a year marked by a devastating plague and a quietly assembled rebellion. Led by 17-year-old Janey Solomon, who is holding her body's development at bay to retain any lingering shreds of adolescent freedom, the island's daughters begin to ask forbidden questions: Why do so many women mysteriously bleed out in childbirth after defying the island's traditions? Is there habitable land beyond their shores? Can any of them choose to stray from their assigned fate? It's a chilling tale of an insular culture grounded in "the art of closing off the world to those who seek it." Melamed's prose is taut and precise. Her nuanced characters and honest examination of the crueler sides of human nature establish her as a formidable author in the vein of Shirley Jackson and Margaret Atwood. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Kirkus Review

A band of young girls grows to undermine the world they were born into.Vanessa, Amanda, Caitlin, and Janey live on an island, at an indefinite distance from the U.S. mainland. It's not clear what year it is or when, exactly, the island was colonized. The girls and their families are all descended from 10 "ancestors" who founded the island society. The only ones to leave the island are the "wanderers," who travel to the mainlandthe "wastelands"to bring back supplies. In this world, women and girls live tightly proscribed lives. Children run riot during the summers, but, once they reach puberty, girls undergo a summer of "fruition" before they are married and begin breeding. In her debut novel, Melamed, a psychiatric nurse practitioner, has written a terrifying work of speculative fiction. The customs and rules of her island become clear only gradually, so the truth of that world seems to blossom, horribly, in the reader's mind. In their own way, the girls begin to resist their society. To put off puberty, Janey starves herself. Vanessa, whose father is a wanderer, devours the books he brings back from his travels. Further details would require spoilers. Suffice it to say the apparently placid surface of their world begins to roil. Melamed is a masterful writer, and she establishes a hauntingly vivid atmosphere. While it may be difficult at first to differentiate among her many characters, by the end they each become clear. This is a haunting work in the spirit of The Handmaid's Talebut Melamed more than holds her own. Hopefully her debut is a harbinger of more to come. Fearsome, vivid, and raw: Melamed's work describes a world of indoctrination and revolt. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Booklist Review

*Starred Review* In Melamed's quietly horrifying debut, 10 men and their families left the wastelands behind to start a new society on a coastal island. Succeeding generations worship these ancestors and follow their rules, which revolve around gender roles and child-rearing. Children are taught nothing of the wastelands except that the world is burning after an apocalypse and only the chosen Wanderers are allowed to venture back, usually to bring supplies and, once every generation or so, a new family. Women are subservient, children run wild outside for entire summers, and when daughters reach menarche, they spend their summer breeding with the unmarried males of the island. Once autumn comes, they are married off and follow adult rules: two children per family, obey the man of the house, and drink a final draught once your children bear their own children. But society starts to fray when four daughters of the newest breeding generation become rebellious, wanting to know more about the wastelands and desiring more freedom for themselves and other girls. Melamed's gorgeous writing lets the details of this fundamentalist society drip out slowly. Readers will find dread washing over them as the story unfolds, and will be left catching their breath when the full backstory dawns on them. This one belongs on every dystopia reading list.--Vnuk, Rebecca Copyright 2017 Booklist

New York Review of Books Review

"SHE CAN'T see the point of the repetitiveness of it all, people living to create more people and then dying when they're useless, to make room for even more people" : 13-year-old Vanessa Adam reflects on the tiny circuit her life is expected to run, and recognizes its futility. What is the point of a life in which every stage is planned in advance, in which there can be no deviation from the norm? "Gather the Daughters," Jennie Melamed's debut novel, presents a world in which child abuse has been normalized, even sanctified, and in which the salutary pleasures available to girls and women are few and far between - a world in which girls make a harrowingly quick journey from childhood to motherhood to death. Vanessa lives on a secluded island where a darkly patriarchal society has settled after fleeing the destruction of a scourge. The ever-present suggestions of the misery and ruin endured in the wastelands beyond the island allow men called wanderers to maintain a rigid social order, their list of "shalt-nots" including things like "Thou shalt not raise more than two children" and "Thou shalt not touch a daughter who has bled until she enters her summer of fruition." In this blending of repressive regime with dystopian future, "Gather the Daughters" shares a genetic code with Kazuo Ishiguro's "Never Let Me Go" and Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale." It imagines a world in which reproduction is heavily controlled, and where women and girls must submit - totally - to male authority. To my mind, the central question of "Gather the Daughters" is this: Does the island represent dystopia or utopia? Melamed doesn't want us to entertain this question, though the structure of the novel demands it. Whose utopian ideal was powerful enough to create this dystopia? If we look at this society from the point of view of the girls and women, the novel's answer is clear. From an early age, girls are subject to the abuse and control of their fathers. Once married, the girls must bear children (a vast number are "defectives" - stillbirths and miscarriages), serve their husbands, and watch as their own daughters are conscripted into girlhoods of abuse. This regime is so obviously, unimpeachably bad that it makes the minuscule numbers of women who eventually resist perplexing, though perhaps this is explained by the sheer endlessness of psychic and sexual abuse. But what of the men? Few men - if any - willingly resist the island's abusive regime, despite the sense that this community has existed for multiple generations. More than that, though, the wanderers seem to have little trouble in persuading couples to emigrate to the island. It's these couples that are most disturbing: The emigré men are presented as clear predators, with wives who are so broken that they can't fathom the depravity of the island's rules. "Gather the Daughters" highlights an increasingly obvious problem with the project of feminist dystopian fiction: How does the genre understand its aesthetic aims when the presentation of suffering - extreme and inhumane - is a necessary part of its political aims? At what point does the depiction of such suffering tip into a pornography of violence? In this case, the novel's final twist is signaled so far in advance it barely registers as a twist. Even before that moment, Vanessa has a conversation with one of the wastelanders, who has moved to the island with her husband: " 'So tell me, Vanessa, what advice would you give to someone who's just moved here?' "Vanessa stares at her and tries to think of something Mrs. Adam might not have been told. Something every woman knows, but doesn't usually say. 'Have sons?' " These sons end up as ghostly narrative curiosities in Melamed's novel, bearing no resemblance to the cruel men who lord over the island's women. Vanessa's younger brother, Ben, is a sweet, curlyheaded 3-year-old. But the novel's logic insists that Ben, too, must grow up. And if Vanessa's future is a foregone conclusion, so is his.

Library Journal Review

In this compulsive and suspenseful debut, Amanda, Caitlin, Janey, and -Vanessa have grown up on the island. They are daughters and members of a religious cult established by ten original male ancestors who had left the "wastelands" for their island paradise. Scripture defines strict gender roles for the community, which are enforced by the Wanderers-the only members who have contact and regular dealings with the outside world. The girls are desperate to learn more about the wastelands, as their lives, apart from the carefree summers when they are allowed to run wild, are a series of painful and traumatizing experiences. None of them wants to become a woman, or a Mother, and no female wants her daughters to experience what they have been subjected to. When one of the girls is murdered for wanting to leave, the others form a resistance. Their vulnerability and powerlessness in the face of their oppression and abuse is heartbreaking. VERDICT This beautifully and carefully constructed work pulls no punches in its depiction of a bleak future; it will attract fans of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and readers who enjoy horror, suspense, and dystopian fiction.-Karin Thogersen, Huntley Area P.L., IL © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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