The women form tenuous bonds over their extended detention, but they have also internalized the culture's sexist attitudes%E2%80%94the "dull fear and hatred" of the female body%E2%80%94and thus their sisterhood is occasionally riven by suspicion and scorn. One of their captors checks his online dating profile another does morning yoga. Their horrid, punishing captivity is also marked by an eerie normality.
As glancing references to their former lives indicate, each of the "bald and frightened girls" was at the center of a public scandal involving powerful men: sports stars, politicians, television hosts, religious leaders. "You need to know what you are," one of the guards tells them. They are sheared and leashed and marched and beaten. A group of drugged women wake up in a remote, dilapidated compound whose wild grounds are surrounded by an electrified fence. The unsettling opening launches readers into a nightmare. The latest from Australian novelist Wood (Animal People) is allegory at its best, a phantasmagoric portrait of modern culture's sexual politics textured by psychological realism and sparing lyricism.
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