When I was a child, I first noticed that neither history as I was taught it nor the stories I was told seemed to lead to me. I began to fix them.

CBR10Bingo – Brain Candy

If you’ve read this book, you’re already horrified by my calling it Brain Candy. But I am taking that literally and applying it directly to the book. This book involves a horribly oppressed and traumatized and abused woman, Connie, who begins the book off being forced into a mental health facility against her will through the betrayal of her niece and the violence of her niece’s pimp/fiance.

Brain Candy!

So what happens next is that Connie is latched onto from the future because of her ability to receive a signal from the future where she can be pulled for chunks of time. So since this category is about escapism, this book has literal escapism.

This book goes back and forth from the future and past/present times. The future mostly involves a kind of primitivist Feminist utopia, not unlike any Feminist utopia you might otherwise imagine from a sci-fi book written by women in the 70s. It has mostly of-the-Earth gardening practices, flipped and dismantled gender roles, freer and equalized sexual roles, a flipping of age gaps in relationships. All that. As a woman in the past, even though she’s abused, Connie takes some time to get used to those changes, but also, because she spends so much time in her own time, she’s fending off the alienation, the isolation, the forced Thorazine, and the other abuses of her time.

The book is decidedly angry and caught up in itself–meaning there’s a righteous indignation in the various traumas visited upon Connie, and by extension women, as well as a kind of frustration at how easy and relatively simple the differences in the future society.

 

(Photo: http://www.nndb.com/people/282/000104967/)