Gather the Daughters by Jennie Melamed, book review: I doubt it will become a cult classic

Jennie Melamed’s debut novel Gather the Daughters explores the tensions within a small island-based rural community in which traditional gender roles hold sway.

Her characters aren’t Amish, but island life revolves around a twisted take on rumspringa (“running around”), the Amish adolescent rite of passage during which teenagers are exempt from the usual strict rules and encouraged to explore the wider world, before (hopefully) deciding to return to the fold of their own free will and embrace their adult lives.

It’s also considered a good opportunity for courtships. In Melamed’s version, every summer all prepubescent island children old enough to walk take to the woods and the beaches, running wild and feral together until the first autumn frost creeps across the ground. Meanwhile, back at home, those girls who’ve reached their “summer of fruition” (have begun to menstruate) are forced to partake in an orgiastic mating ritual – months of enforced free love (those unwilling are drugged into submission) – before they take a husband and become obedient wives and, if the ancestors see fit to bless them, fruitful mothers.

Similar to The Handmaid’s Tale, Melamed sets her story in a dystopian future where a “scourge” has punished mankind and “defective” births are common. Unlike Atwood’s tale, though, we’re given barely any information regarding life beyond the island, Melamed cleverly keeping us as much in the dark, and thus just as frustrated, as her enquiring adolescent protagonists. The “wanderers” – the men who hold the highest rank in the community – visit “the wastelands” across the waters, telling tales of a “world of fire”, but as the narrative progresses both we and the girls from whose perspectives the story is told, have reason to become increasingly distrustful of what we hear.

It’s a richly envisioned world, the strange isolation of which Melamed is excellent at teasing out slowly enough to ensure we become progressively more and more unsettled by the community’s rules and rituals. What the girls are put through – “the love that felt... wrong,” as one of them describes it: preteen daughter and father incest is routine, and is so unsavoury it made me question quite what the bigger point of it all was.

Melamed certainly doesn’t revel in titillation, but I had to wonder whether adult human nature really is as perverse, cruel and blindly unquestioning as she seems to believe. She’s much more attuned to her younger protagonists however – occasional clunky dialogue and atonality aside – and excels at manifesting emotion as a something children experience viscerally: silence that “crawled up her ankles, lapped at her knees, enveloped her waist, and then drew itself tightly over her face like a suffocating sheet”, or grief as a liquid that “passes thickly down her throat as she drinks water and pools soggily around her food ... flows through her veins, dark and heavy ... coats her skin like a slick of fat”.

I doubt it’ll become a cult classic, more likely a short-term hit, especially if you’re looking for something to fill The Handmaid’s Tale hole in your life as the TV adaptation draws to a close.

‘Gather the Daughters’ by Jennie Melamed is published by Tinder Press, £18.99