I feel a little mixed about this book. I agree with some of the reviews that felt there were issues with the plotting and pace - parts of it were hard to follow and it did sag in the middle. But there was an interesting premise and some sections I really enjoyed.

As others have noted, the story deals with sensitive ideas clumsily and insensitively. There is a lot of ableist and transphobic language and ideas causally thrown about. It is also odd to read a book that has all female characters where none have any agency.

While the idea of The Men as travelling through an unfamiliar almost fantasy landscape is intriguing, the main characters are very thin, with stacks of backstory replacing any emotional development. The final act introduces a twist that is both irritating and just serves to make the end of the novel much less satisfying. The author was clearly trying to make a point they thought was really important, but I couldn’t figure out what it was.

I hope that the book receives another edit before publication because the story is a mess. There’s a ton of word for word repetition across the multiple POVs. The action flips between the past and the present, while some action is verbally reported almost diary style. There’s no indicators to note the change in POV or tone so it takes a while to reorient yourself in the story whenever it flips POV.

It’s similar to The End of Men by Christina Sweeney-Baird and I Who Have Never Known by Jacqueline Halpern (both of which I preferred to The Men) and Femlandia by Christina Dalcher (which I also did not enjoy).

While the premise intrigued me, I think I wanted to like this book more than I did. The story follows several characters in their experiences with a strange phenomenon that made half the human population disappear overnight and how the people left behind tried to rebuild society into either the world that it was before, or something brand new.

Overall I found this novel a little disappointing, though there were aspects that I did enjoy, such as the characters' differing narrations to explore reactions to this world event; the inclusion of trans characters and how they were affected by a phenomenon that affects particular genetic chromesomes; and in particular the surrealist nature of the video footage of The Men. I didn't connect with any of the characters in particular, which as a reader means I found it difficult to enjoy the plot or thematic discussion because I wasn't particularly invested in how the story unfolded.

I liked Newman's writing style, as it felt unusually cinematic and visual (I can only imagine how incredible the video footage of the disappeared would look on an actual cinema screen), so I would read another book by her, but I won't be buying a hardcopy of The Men.

The Men has a high-concept premise: everybody with a Y chromosome suddenly disappears from the world, and those left behind have to rebuild it. Despite this, I'm not sure that Sandra Newman actually needed a world without men (and trans women and some intersex and non-binary people) to tell the story she wanted to tell. This novel focuses on two captivatingly flawed women drawn into a close relationship with each other: Jane, a white convicted sex offender who was exploited by an older man when she was a teenager and took the rap for his crimes, and Evangelyne, a black woman who was imprisoned for more than a decade for shooting the cops that killed her family.

The Men spends almost as much time on these women's backstories prior to the Y-chromosome-only Rapture, than it does on exploring a world without men. When Jane and Evangelyne meet at college, Evangelyne is already famous for the text she wrote in prison on commensalism, arguing that this biological concept can be applied to human society to show that it is ethical to 'eat the rich', as wealthy people derive little benefit from being so wealthy. (Newman is good at inventing a radical literary trajectory for Evangelyne; her more personal essay 'The White Girl' is her other most famous work, describing the events that led up to her shooting incident). Evangelyne then becomes the leader of a group called ComPA which rises to power as society reorganises in light of the Rapture.

All this reminded me much more of books about all-female groups trying to build utopias, like Sarah Hall's excellent The Carhullan Army, than books that play with sex and gender, like Nicola Griffiths' Ammonite and Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness. Indeed, I got the impression that Newman isn't that interested in writing about sex/gender constructs, despite a couple of insightful lines ('the concept of "men" had always been religious. All women were sold the idea of men as superior beings... Trans men could be masculine without making sex into a two-tier system, as cis men always had. We could love one another face-to-face, where before we had loved only through a glass darkly: so the ComPAs said'). This, I think, is why most of the mentions of trans and non-binary people feel so crowbarred in; gender isn't Newman's focus. Parts of the novel are also truly beautiful and hypnotic, even as they feel disconnected from the story at hand: 'We pondered, the cozy, uncomfortable hum of the bus all around and a heavy East Texas rain making lines of wavy light on the windows, lines that trembled and were deformed in wind... We have no real face; they are masks that are borrowed and passed on, that live for millennia and are what a human is.'

However, although The Men is original and insightful, it's also frankly bizarre. The narrative is weird and disjointed. Much of the novel is narrated by Jane, a straightforward choice that makes sense, but it trails into bits from other narrators who seem to have little to do with the main thrust of the plot. Many women are obsessed with watching a TV show called 'The Men' that shows naked men wandering a blasted landscape peopled with strange beasts, but the purpose of these interludes is not clear. Some reviewers have suggested that The Men is gender-essentialist and transphobic; while I largely disagree, it certainly struggles to make sense of all the ideas flung into its melting pot. I think it's also fair to say that it wasn't a great plan to tackle such a controversial premise when you don't have a lot to say about gender. Because of this unevenness, this book is very hard to rate, but I did find it engrossing. 3.5 stars.

I think it's one of those book that you have to re-read to make sense of what you read and appreciate the characters.
I liked the concept and the style of writing but didn't like the book that left confused and wondering about what I read.
Not my cup of tea
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

I found this book very difficult to engage with and didn’t like any of the characters. There were too many subjects being addressed and this made the narrative confusing. Having enjoyed The Heavens I felt this book missed its potential.

Controversial before it even appeared in print, Sandra Newman’s novel’s an awkward, sometimes perplexing mix of speculative fiction and trauma fantasy. Her plot opens with a whole swathe of people suddenly disappearing from the known/charted world, their only shared characteristic that they were all capable or “potentially capable” of producing sperm. Central to the narrative is Jane Pearson a convicted sex offender, who as a teenager was groomed and exploited, and then falsely assumed to be in cahoots with her victimiser. Alongside Jane, Newman includes a host of other, more peripheral recurring figures, but Jane’s the only one whose story’s recounted in the first person. It’s not clear what’s happened to the lost population but an online streaming site offers access to a series called ‘The Men’ a possible reality show in which the lost seem to be existing in a kind of hellish parallel world, at the mercy of strange, unclassifiable creatures.

Newman’s novel’s been slated for its portrayal of gender identity particularly when it comes to the trans community, and I think I can see why that's the case, although what Newman actually intended to communicate isn’t easy to fathom - I found her representation of gender and gender identity overall here surprisingly clumsy, confused and confusing. Newman’s been explicit about the fact that she’s writing in relation to a long and specific history of feminist SF fiction from Herland to The Female Man and the book features a number of references to canonical SF texts including The Island of Dr Moreau but the structuring of the material is convoluted, the way the action shifts between an array of characters doesn’t help with that, just as one is established, another’s introduced. The ending too is a rather bewildering one. I think on some level this is intended as a kind of ironic, social commentary/satire about contemporary America in relation to racism and gender-based oppression – there’s something slightly Nabokovian about Jane’s backstory - but I couldn’t really connect with it or it could be that it simply misfires. It may be that others will see things in this that I’ve managed to miss or overlook but my overall impression was a less than positive one. There are some intriguing elements and some well-written or inventive passages but I didn’t find the social critique particularly engaging or convincing, and Jane’s story didn’t work for me. Ultimately this was just too heavy-handed for my taste and at times I found the pace excruciatingly slow.

Thanks to Netgalley and Granta for an ARC

"When the men disappeared, it felt like nothing."

I loved the idea of this book. I loved the unnerving shift in society that occurred when the men went missing. I loved speculating about if Mother Nature was reclaiming the planet or if something sinister had happened. I loved exploring the idea of women being able to break free from endless oppression without male control.

But I spent most of this book waiting for the backstories to end and for something to happen. I'm afraid for me, the pacing and layout of this book made it very slow and difficult to read. It felt disconnected and for most of the book it was just a very long selection of backstories about women who knew men that had gone - and while I understand the concept was to make us reflect on morality and humanity, some of it did read as hateful and problematic.

I'd possibly read this again after a sensitivity read and an edit to cut the filler down.

Having loved Sandra Newman's book 'The Heavens', I was very excited for this book, which is equally ambitious in scope.

However, although I couldn't fault the scale or writing skill of this book, I occasionally found myself a bit lost.

The idea of the book is that everyone with a Y chromosome suddenly disappears overnight, and society suddenly scrambles to deal with not only the loss caused by this, but also the potential for reordering society, especially now that the population is now a majority of cisgender women who do not feel the need to correct and contort themselves around cisgender men and specific gender roles.

I found some of the writing around these parts profound- what cis women would do if they were no longer looking over their shoulders at night, and how much freer they would feel.

However, for me the plot then started to get a little convoluted, with flashbacks and changes of characters interrupting the parts I was most enjoying. At times this also made the 'new world' of the book feel less fleshed out, because there was almost too much going on at once, and so some of the points of the book didn't hit home like I was hoping.

Many reviewers have also pointed to the ending of the book, which I won't spoil here, but which left me a little cold, and felt like it undermined some of the propulsive energy of the opening pages.

I received an advanced copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

The author’s previous book “The Heavens” could hardly be faulted for ambition, but more could for execution and seemed to be several novels in one: a relatively standard/derivative dystopian science fiction scenario (here the idea of time travel to the past altering the present) presented in a way which seemed to draw heavily on Dr Who; with some historical fiction (which walked on the edge between some prithee-heavy dialogue and some actually very beautiful writing); political commentary (here on why we accept the world as it is while also believing it can be changed); an examination of abusive relationships; and a actually moving description of mental illness.

This book is also I think a rather ambitious but sometimes slightly clumsily executed mix of:

Relatively standard/derivative dystopian (possibly utopian) science fiction (the particular trope here being the sudden rapture-style disappearance of men);

A twist on this aspect which rather than really spending too much time trying to add some pseudo-science to explain it – instead goes for much more of a X-Factor/spooky/mystical/open-ended explanation with a series of strange and videos of those who disappeared (which give the book its title) which fuel various conspiracy theories, and a resolution which will I think prove very controversial with some readers (and give those looking for an excuse to criticise the book some ammunition);

Two very involved back stories for the two main characters (which feel like they could and possibly should have been a novel in themselves) – one serving as a quote troubling examination of an abusive grooming-style relationship in ballet, and the other as an examination of American societal/police racism against an African-American traditional religious movement as well as of an radical form of politics based on mixing the Biological concept of Commensalism with a view that additional wealth adds effectively zero Utility.

I say clumsily executed because in the disappearance story the author (and possibly publishers) attempt to add racial diversity and to address issues of gender fluidity seems (to me) rather tokenistic and also appears to have backfired.

Overall definitely an interesting novel which is already dividing opinion in readers and on which I have decidedly mixed opinions.

I really liked the premise and was looking forward to reading it. I was curious about it due to all the negative publicity surrounding it re it being supposedly transphobic. Having read it, I didn't think it was transphobic in the slightest. I enjoyed the book to some degree but was massively let down by the ending...it was odd and didn't make much sense to me. The journey was better than the destination.

A really tough book to review. My favourite elements by far were the descriptions of the hell to which "the men" were sent, which were weird and disturbing and horrific in a way I really enjoyed. The hints at wider, supernatural causes of the event really caught me and parts of the book I liked a lot. In the end, however, my enjoyment was undercut by the very simplistic handling of the chromosome issue. Just once I want to read a book about gender which acknowledges people with intersex conditions/DSD) and I really thought that Sandra Newman would be the person to do it. It's not fair to judge a book by what I wanted it to be, but nonetheless I was disappointed at the unexpectedly binary approach they took. However, the real annoyance for me was the final message that a world ruled by women (or XX chromosome havers) would be an inherently kinder, softer, better world because women are inherently kinder, softer and more caring. In the final pages, the main character concludes "Some men are instinctively compassionate, as women are," and I rolled my eyes so hard they hurt.

I thoroughly enjoyed the start of this book, but as the pages turned I started wondering how it was all going to be wrapped up. To say I was disappointed is an understatement. It's a real shame, because the writing is brilliant and the characters are crafted well. On that basis, the book deserves 3 stars. I feel completely cheated though.

My thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley. This review was written voluntarily and is entirely my own, unbiased, opinion.

I was looking forward to reading this book, but I found it very challenging to read. I didn't enjoy reading it, and found it very odd. The details of sexual abuse were hard to read, and they could trigger some people, I don't normally do spoilers, but I think this book should come with a warning about that. Overall not a book that I enjoyed and not one I would recommend.

Jane Pearson wakes on a mountainside the next morning to find her husband and son missing from their tent. Frantic and grieving, she sets out to find the one person she thinks can help - Evangelyne Moreau, the brilliant, charismatic leader of the Commensalist Party of America, whose heart she broke many years before. A really enjoyable thriller, that kept me guessing until the end!

Thank you to the author, the publisher and Netgalley for giving me this ebook in return for a review.

I chose to request this book because the main conceit of this novel is quite appealing: post apocalyptic fiction is always interesting but when it means the disappearance of one gender it takes a more fantastical turn. And obviously losing all the men in the world is a trope that is well used. I haven’t watch the Disney+ programme because its clearly a male fantasy when it’s one man to many women but this seemed so different. A possible female utopia sounds as attractive now as it did in Herland!

And it is on the whole very gripping. We follow the main character Jane (why is she called Jane when the whole point is she meant to be recognisable? Even a Jane Pearson is going to be forgettable.) as she awakes and finds her husband and son have disappeared. But we soon learn she is not alone and meet a raft of other characters who’ve similarly lost their male friends and relatives. I found these hard to keep straight; who they were and what they’d lost and really whilst this was a nice touch it could have been handled better. Also why not a woman who’d not got any male loved ones? How would they respond?

Jane’s back story is that she was subject to a specific kind of sexual abuse and as a result has become infamous. The only real point of this perhaps was so that she would have a connection with the other main character, Evangelyne but otherwise it felt quite unnecessary. She is an interesting character and the way the relationship between the two women develops both before and after the apocalypse is fascinating. Evangelyne herself is a amazing and I could really believe in her.

However, there are two ways this book fails and both rather spectacular. One is the treatment of trans people and that is why it will always, always be denigrated. The writer doesn’t leave room for any argument other than gender is your sex at birth and every transman is alive and every transwoman has disappeared. This is considerably worse than anything that JK Rowling has said or implied. So it alienates masses and masses of people.

The second issue that makes the above even worse is the ending. I won’t spoil it but let’s just say it turns out to be both pointless (which makes the transphobia worse - why be transphobic in an imaginary world if there is no lasting context even in the book’s “world”? Why put that much effort into offending people for no real reason?!) and racist. It may be a literary technique that the likes of Ian McEwan have used but it really destroys everything here: from characters to the suspension of disbelief and the readers’ trust. The racism is more subtle and is a result of the ending not an indelible part of the whole plot like the transphobia is.

Lastly, There is never any answer as to why the apocalypse is happening: why it’s been caused and how the person at the centre of it has that power. It’s infuriating!

I liked the story until the ending; I loved the female utopia where little girls were free to do what they wanted because they were totally safe. The transphobia annoyed me but it isn’t a massive part of the story so I could avoid thinking about it. But the ending was just so awful it made me feel like there was nothing to gain from the novel; that it was just a waste of my life!

Goodness - it is such a good start that I had really high hopes and started talking to people about the book before I had finished it. The concept of all the men on earth suddenly disappearing is compelling and set off all sorts of 'what if's in my thought process. I was excited to find out what happened.

It did feel rather that the author then run out of ideas - we are introduced to a whole party of characters, some important, some dispensable. The back stories were important but somehow felt a bit laboured and I began to wonder where it was all going. I think the author felt this too as suddenly nearly at the end things take a magical mystery turn. It is one of those books that I finished and thought 'What?' - a day later I am still trying to piece it all together.

If you like an interesting concept and a brain teaser of a finish this is the book for you.

The concept of this book immediately caught my interest a world where all men suddenly disappear , the reason for this was not fully described, The book starts from the moment when all men and boys suddenly disappeared and looks at the reaction of one woman who was camping with her son and his father and woke to find them missing . The initial episode is described beautifully the sheer terror of finding her family missing and then not being able to find them or to raise any help when. ringing emergency services was nightmareish and made me feel nauseous in sympathy . Likewise some of the initial sections dealing with what the women had lost were poetic in their structure and deeply moving
After dealing with initial disappearance so well the story starts to follow the. past of the mother spending a lo of time looking at her past relationship with another woman who she had left to be with the father of her son , she is not fully reconciled with this decision and when the men disappear she is pulled to link up again with this. charismatic woman.
I found the sections following the immediate reaction. to the loss of men less interesting and really wanted to know more of why they had disappeared. The author describes a man free world as representing freedom from subjugation to men , women were free to leave their homes unlocked and walk around naked in public ( I found this highly unlikely but it did make me smile .
The sections which detailed the supposed fake news articles surrounding the. disappeared men some of whom were filmed after the event in a trance like state thoroughly confused me and it was only explained by the plot twist at the end of the book , the scenes were in deed nightmariesh .
Because of my confusion I found the book a struggle to fully immerse myself in and felt it had just missed its initial potential ,I didn't find myself liking the characters and didn't find some of their decisions believable . I was cross about the ending and felt cheated ,

I was immediately hooked by both the cover and concept of this book. It’s a dystopian novel where everyone with a Y chromosome disappears at the same moment. While most dystopian novels might focus on the impacts of this on the world and society, this is a much more personal exploration of grief, trauma, race and love. It uses the concept-led tale as a backdrop for some very considered and engaging character drama. It’s highly readable, poignant and thoughtful, though many of the plot strands seem mildly superfluous and don’t add a lot to the tale. I’d personally have enjoyed this more if some of the side characters had been removed and we’d had a little more time with the two protagonists, but I still enjoyed this quite a lot.

What a strange, hypnotic, lyrical book. Based off the premise, I was expecting more of a straightforward dystopian pandemic-type novel. Instead, it was a gorgeously written novel about gender, sexuality, race, and the variety of ways in which humans damage each other intentionally and through misunderstandings, with a heavy dash of sci-fi in-between.

I'm not sure that having multiple perspectives shown was necessary, especially since the bulk of the story was told from Jane's first person POV. I would have preferred to stay with her, especially since Alma, Ji-Won, Blanca, and Ruth were not given very much character depth. And while they do end up connecting, I don't think it's necessary for the novel.

I feel conflicted about the ending, and feel that it was a bit abrupt, but overall it was such a well-written, beautiful book that I bumped it from 3.5 to 4 stars.

Thanks for the digital ARC, NetGalley!!