The Men

By: Sandra Newman

Narrated by: Mia Barron

Length: 8 hrs and 17 mins

Publisher's summary

From the author of The Heavens, a dazzling, mind-bending novel in which all men mysteriously disappear from the face of the earth.

Deep in the California woods on an evening in late August, Jane Pearson is camping with her husband, Leo, and their five-year-old son, Benjamin. As dusk sets in, she drifts softly to sleep in a hammock strung outside the tent where Leo and Benjamin are preparing for bed. At that moment, every single person with a Y chromosome vanishes around the world, disappearing from operating theaters mid-surgery, from behind the wheels of cars, from arguments and acts of love. Children, adults, even fetuses are gone in an instant. Leo and Benjamin are gone. No one knows why, how, or where.

After the Disappearance, Jane forces herself to enter a world she barely recognizes, one where women must create new ways of living while coping with devastating grief. As people come together to rebuild depopulated industries and distribute scarce resources, Jane focuses on reuniting with an old college girlfriend, Evangelyne Moreau, leader of the Commensalist Party of America, a rising political force in this new world. Meanwhile, strange video footage called “The Men” is being broadcast online showing images of the vanished men marching through barren, otherworldly landscapes. Is this just a hoax, or could it hold the key to the Disappearance?

From the author of The Heavens, The Men is a gripping, beautiful, and disquieting novel of feminist utopias and impossible sacrifices that interrogates the dream of a perfect society and the conflict between individual desire and the good of the community.

©2022 Sandra Newman (P)2022 Recorded Books

Then she woke up

Read "The White Plague" by Frank Herbert for a more honest exploration of this class of "high concept" sexual themes. It would have been more engaging if the actual consequences of all white chromosome bearing humans disappearing had been explored. The excuse provided at the end to avoid realism in this respect strikes me as a cop-out. Throwing in racial conflict in such a stereotypical way panders to the target audience perhaps and maybe it was a result of good marketing but I feel cheated.

Not what I expected and that's okay

Nick Gillespie recommended this author on The Reason Roundtable (10/30/2023). After reviewing her tires, I chose this one to start with The Men, thinking it would be a sci-fi social commentary. Kind of yeah and kind of no. But definitely interesting and thought provoking.

I'm sadly unsurprised by the reviews here that are negative because the author failed to write the book the reader thought they should have written. Those reviews exemplify the issues the author tackles in the novel.

Hard to Follow

The story was splintered with side stories and plot lines. I wanted to like this book but just couldn’t.

Not sure what I read

A very unusual distorted story that I simply wasn't able to discern its purpose.. The narration and vocabulary however were excellent. Go figure.

Not for everyone- but this has become my favorite book of the year

Holy crap. This book had so many weird twists and nuances that it was hard to pace myself. Fascinating take, weird twists at every turn, and some powerful conversations. If you liked the Showtime hit series Yellowjackets, this could be your new favorite book too.

Good premises, but not so good delivery

I bought this book after reading an opinion piece by Pamela Paul in the NYT: "She Wrote a Dystopian Novel. What Happened Next Was Pretty Dystopian." in which she describes how the author was vilified months before the book was even published. She ended her article with "Most people don’t want to live in a world in which books are vilified without being read and their authors attacked ad hominem for the temerity of having written them. There’s an answer to attacks like these: Read the book."
So I did.
This is not a book that should elicit vehement charges of gender essentialism and transphobia. I agree with another reviewer that good editing is totally missing and could have done wonders. Still, I was entertained for 8 hours.

Great story, but would rather read

The Audible version has quite a few errors, repeated sentences several times and mis-pronunciations. I loved the story but it was not produced well for Audio.

Not What I Expected but Glad I Listened

I came to this expecting sci-fi and this isn’t that genre at all, however it was a well crafted meditation on gender, race and privilege through a female lens. A fast listen that I found thought provoking.

The worst book I've listened to

I purchased this book as I thought the story line would make for good reading. What a disappointment this was and I'm glade I only paid less than $5 for it; I now know why it was discounted. This was the first time in 30 years of listening to audio books that I found myself forward skipping chapters to find out what the heck was going on with the plot. Also the first time I gave up and did not finish the book. The author just went on and on and on on sub plots to no end. The narrator did a good job. The story line sounded like fun, but the Audible description of the book sucked.

It’s A Fantasy of the Narrator

Blessed are the oppressed, for they shall blame others for all their woes.

The very white hetero privileged elite bourgeoisie binary female narrator, also a convicted pedophile, evades owning her guilt for raping minors, and does so by blaming men for either making her do it or for not saving her from herself. While on a camping trip with her husband and son, she imagines a utopia where all men have suddenly vanished and women rule the world. Much easier to imagine a world with no men than admit to illegally and immorally bedding them. In this emasculated world, women find themselves much better off and the world a much better place. And yet women can’t stop thinking about, blaming, complaining, and watching videos of men while displaying a profound absence of curiosity about how half the world’s population just disappeared one day.

A skilled articulation of the Feminist worldview. A must read for anyone who wants to understand Feminism and the power and moral imperviousness of ideological victimhood.