You Are Mine by Janeal Falor [DNF review]

TL;DR misogynist society to the "~extreme~"

not on TBR

Kindle ebook downloaded for free via Bookbub 12/3/16

DNF 1/7/17

I was gonna stick this in a post with some other reviews of books I didn't finish, but I got significantly further in You are Mine than the others, so I figured it deserved its own post.

I decided to download You are Mine because it went pretty far into the dystopian genre, that women are literally just property and are only valued for having male children. (Usually dystopians don't go this drastic.) I was curious how this was going to be executed, and it was free, so I figured why not?

I hadn't set many expectations going in, so it didn't really fail me, but it definitely didn't try to impress me, either. It came off as a Western adaptation (read: travesty) of conservative, "oh so scary" Islamic countries, like Saudi Arabia. The restrictions and lack of human rights for women in You are Mine were based on vague reasons and I have so many unanswered questions -- where did the women's canon come from? What is this system of magic based on and when was it decided that it was only worthwhile to men? Why is there no mention of women learning to use it at all? This was actually the hardest to believe -- even in regions where groups like the Taliban have prevented girls from attending school, girls like Malala Yousafzai still pursued an education.

(I'm a geography major. I took AP Human Geo in high school and thoroughly enjoyed it. I'll admit I maybe nitpicked these cultural worldbuilding elements a little more than the average person would.)

Likewise, it was also hard for me to believe that Serena was actually supposed to be from this world. Her characterization was inconsistent in the sense that she kept slipping up and questioning how their world worked, only to roll right along with something (or sometimes the same thing) a scene or two later. Or she would forget about certain customs / gender roles that should have been ingrained into her since birth (example: when she sat down in the doctor's chair in the first chapter or so).

I was theoretically gonna read this all the way through, but I wasn't enjoying it at all, so DNFing it seemed like a better option. And I will admit that it seems like I might be the minority, since I don't remember seeing many negative reviews on Goodreads.

TL;DR I couldn't buy the worldbuilding and that killed the reading experience for me.