Lilibet Bombshell's Reviews > Yours for the Taking

If there’s one topic that simultaneously scares me to death and enrages me, it’s eugenics. Combine eugenics with the additional evils of capitalism, and I’ll get sick with anxiety. So, mix eugenics, capitalism, and the type of feminism practiced by the likes of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (you know, the kind where only cisgendered, rich, smart, childbearing, white women are the ones truly deserving of equality) up together in a part and that’s what terrifies me about Yours for the Taking.

This book is largely a conspiracy thriller set in a dystopian future that deals mainly with LGBTQ and women’s issues within a psychological context. That’s more or less the construct we’ve got going on here. You can read about the plot of the book in the blurb, but know that the blurb isn’t quite as clear as it seems. The narrative structure for the book is from multiple POV’s played out in third person: Ava, Jacqueline, Shelby, Olympia, and more all have chapters told from their perspective. It is a linear timeline structure, which is very nice because between the plot and the multiple narrators it would definitely feel unnecessarily complicated to manipulate the timeline.

While the book is very well-written, I did feel at times that the book did veer from its seeming mission to aim for scathing social commentary on non-intersectional feminism, transphobia, and queer erasure into the territory of being almost satirical or too on the nose. If you’re going to write satire then you need to lean all the way into it for the whole book. However, the terrors of eugenics were portrayed all too well, as were the horrors of mind control.

My most common complaint that resounded in my mind again and again as I read this book came from my geography degree: The premise that anyone would build a shelter to house the chosen ones of North America for the unforeseeable future–possibly forever–on the island of Manhattan in a world after global climate change has melted the ice caps makes absolutely no sense. The island of Manhattan is unstable. It’s mostly made up of infill dirt. It’s largely an artificial island. It was a swamp before it was colonized. If a shelter like the one in the book were to be built, it would have been built on the mainland, not on Manhattan Island.

Other than that, it’s an excellent book that asks great questions about nature versus nurture, the patriarchy, feminism, parenthood, sisterhood, and where will humans go when the tide finally rises.

I was provided a copy of this title by NetGalley and the author. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. This review was written without compensation. Thank you.

File Under: Conspiracy Thriller/Dystopian Fiction/LGBTQ Fiction/Psychological Fiction/Women’s Fiction