Led by 17-year-old Janey Solomon, who is holding her body's development at bay to retain any lingering shreds of adolescent freedom, the island's daughters begin to ask forbidden questions: Why do so many women mysteriously bleed out in childbirth after defying the island's traditions? Is there habitable land beyond their shores? Can any of them choose to stray from their assigned fate? It's a chilling tale of an insular culture grounded in 'the art of closing off the world to those who seek it.' Melamed's prose is taut and precise. The darker truths behind their heavily patriarchal society in which girls must submit first to their fathers, then to their husbands emerge over the course of a year marked by a devastating plague and a quietly assembled rebellion. In her searing portrayal of a utopian society gone wrong, four girls share their stories of life on a sheltered island where they are ostensibly safe from the war- and disease-torn wastelands that their ancestors had escaped generations earlier.

Melamed's haunting and powerful debut blazes a fresh path in the tradition of classic dystopian works. Gather the Daughters is a smoldering debut dark and energetic, compulsively readable, Melamed's novel announces her as an unforgettable new voice in fiction. Trying urgently now to unravel the mysteries of the island and what lies beyond, before her own demise, she attempts to lead an uprising of the girls that may be their undoing. At seventeen years old, Janey is so unwilling to become a woman, she is slowly starving herself to death.

And it is at the end of one summer that little Caitlin Jacob sees something so horrifying, so contradictory to the laws of the island, that she must share it with the others.īorn leader Janey Solomon steps up to seek the truth. With the adults indoors and the pubescent in Fruition, the children live wildly - they fight over food and shelter, free of their fathers' hands and their mothers' despair. But in the summer, the younger children reign supreme. They have children, who have children, and when they are no longer useful, they take their final draught and die. At the first sign of puberty, they face their Summer of Fruition, a ritualistic season that drags them from adolescence to matrimony.

The daughters of these men are wives-in-training. Only the Wanderers - chosen male descendants of the original ten - are allowed to cross to the wastelands, where they scavenge for detritus among the still-smoldering fires. They built a radical society of ancestor worship, controlled breeding, and the strict rationing of knowledge and history.

Years ago, just before the country was incinerated to wasteland, ten men and their families colonized an island off the coast. Never Let Me Go meets The Giver in this haunting debut about a cult on an isolated island, where nothing is as it seems.

Gather the Daughters by Jennie Melamed