Women Talking

August is seen as unmanly because he's not a farmer, and seen as an outsider because his parents were excommunicated and he was raised mostly outside of his Mennonite community. Perhaps for those reasons, he is asked by Ona, his childhood friend, to take minutes for a group of Mennonite women who are meeting to decide how to respond to their repeated assault and rape by men in their community. August is the narrator of this novel, which records the deliberations of the women as they struggle to come to agreement about what they will do, and what reasons support their decision.

The novel is dialogue interspersed with narrative about what the women are doing as they talk, so we get a physical sense of the women and their characters. Some are full of rage, some sad, some cynical and sarcastic. They are young and old and they are family to each other, literal mothers, daughters, and sisters, as well as cousins and neighbors. Their conversation digs into the conditions of their life and their culture and exposes their vulnerability to harm at the hands of the men in their community, as well as their earnest desire to be true to their faith—to cultivate love and forgiveness, and to forgo violence. These are heavy themes, but no one makes long speeches. One woman's habit of using stories about her two elderly horses, Ruth and Cheryl, to illustrate her points is met with eye rolling and impatience from the other women. One of the powers of this book is that the characters are full enough to make what is essentially a theological and philosophical argument feel like a natural conversation.

August himself comes to participate in the conversation and in the action the women end up taking. His additions of his own thoughts to the narrative of the meeting adds important background and deep poignance to the novel. I loved this book.