Before She Sleeps - SFBA Book Club

eBook, 241 pages

English language

Published Nov. 10, 2018 by Delphinium Books.

ISBN:: 978-1-5040-5516-1

(1 review)

In modern, beautiful Green City, the capital of South West Asia, gender selection, war and disease have brought the ratio of men to women to alarmingly low levels. The government uses terror and technology to control its people, and women must take multiple husbands to have children as quickly as possible. Yet there are women who resist, women who live in an underground collective and refuse to be part of the system. Secretly protected by the highest echelons of power, they emerge only at night, to provide to the rich and elite of Green City a type of commodity that nobody can buy: intimacy without sex. As it turns out, not even the most influential men can shield them from discovery and the dangers of ruthless punishment. This dystopian novel from one of Pakistan's most talented writers is a modern-day parable, The Handmaid's Tale about women's lives in repressive Muslim …

In modern, beautiful Green City, the capital of South West Asia, gender selection, war and disease have brought the ratio of men to women to alarmingly low levels. The government uses terror and technology to control its people, and women must take multiple husbands to have children as quickly as possible. Yet there are women who resist, women who live in an underground collective and refuse to be part of the system. Secretly protected by the highest echelons of power, they emerge only at night, to provide to the rich and elite of Green City a type of commodity that nobody can buy: intimacy without sex. As it turns out, not even the most influential men can shield them from discovery and the dangers of ruthless punishment. This dystopian novel from one of Pakistan's most talented writers is a modern-day parable, The Handmaid's Tale about women's lives in repressive Muslim countries everywhere. It takes the patriarchal practices of female seclusion and veiling, gender selection, and control over women's bodies, amplifies and distorts them in a truly terrifying way to imagine a world of post-religious authoritarianism.

5 editions

Phil in SF reviewed Before She Sleeps by Bina Shah

Solid book

4 stars

Content warning minor spoilers

Some aspects of the word-building feel very thin. While I can easily suspend disbelief on a city-state having a virus the decimates its female population, and the government severely restricting the rights of women as a response, things like quiet acquiescence seem hard to sustain. Particularly, the idea of an underground group of women who are prostitutes who don't have sex seems like a hard thing to sustain. There's so few women that men use prostitution bots as a matter of course, and but there are many rich men who just want women to hold them so much they'll pay for the service doesn't seem tenable. The story itself makes it clear that it isn't tenable. But the sexless brothel is already decades past its founding before sex becomes an issue.

Anyway, after a while I was able to put aside my reservations about the setup and enjoy the story, which centers Sabine as she visits her most devoted Client as well as her relationships with other women of the Panah. However, when something goes wrong, the story starts to get into the minds and motivations of a lot of other characters.