User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
Did I give my own book 5 stars? That would be a yes. But I promise you it’s a very good book. It has everything you could want:
😦 a gripping thriller
❤️ heart-wrenching relationships and loss
✨bubbles of humour
👩🏼⚕️strong, wry, determined characters
👩🏽🤝👨🏼 and an exploration of gender and its impact on the world, through the lens of speculative fiction as a deadly plague quickly wipes out 90% of the world’s male population leaving women, and some men, to adapt, cope, survive their losses and restructure the world in a different way from dating to childcare to hospitals to Parliament to industry to agriculture. What would change? What would stay the same?
⭐️ ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ from an (admittedly) incredibly biased observer (but if you can’t give your own book 5 stars, who can?)
Rating: really liked it
I was really intrigued by the premise of this book: what would happen if there was a virus that wiped out much of the male population? The author makes it clear that the book was drafted before the outbreak of Covid-19 however many readers will find it hard not to draw parallels when the real virus has a higher rate of severe illness and mortality in the male population than females. In a way, I think it is unfortunate for the author that the global pandemic hit as she was writing this book as the general population will be more aware of the science of virology and genetics than previously.
My background is in physics so my biology knowledge is not the strongest however I found myself puzzling over one character's explanation of why it appeared to take 135 days (p160) for scientists to be able to explain that the vulnerability of males to the virus was related to the fact that they only had one X chromosome. The character then went on to use male twins to explain why only 10% of the male population is immune and claiming it was "Basic genetic logic." (p162) I hold my hands up to not being a geneticist but if "the Plague requires the absence of a specific gene sequence...present in the X chromosome" and only "9 percent of men" have the necessary protection, this implies that each X chromosome has a 9% chance of creating immunity. For women, this probability does not increase to 100% because they have two X chromosomes. If the above 9% is true then I would assume that the immunity rate for women is double (as you only need one correct copy). As all women were immune it would have made more sense for the vulnerability to have been coded into the Y chromosome with only 9% of Y chromosomes conferring resistance. This theory is undermined by the explanation of finding that "identical twins were both immune but their father was not [and a] set of male fraternal twins has an immune father but only one of the twins was immune".
This, unfortunately, wasn't the least of my science-based confusion. I could perhaps go along with the A&E doctor who was ignored (presumably for being a hysterical woman) at the beginning of the pandemic but much of the early part of the book implied that despite the fact men were dying in ever-increasing numbers, the pandemic wasn't taken seriously. There are numerous papers etc that discuss the fact that historically the medical community has focussed predominantly on health concerns that disproportionately affect men. For a modern-day comparison, one could point to the immediate interest in treating 'Long Covid' compared to the response to the arguably similar conditions ME/CFS which predominantly affect women. Towards the end of the book, there is a brief reference to advances in the treatment of endometriosis etc however this seems poorly extrapolated to the global response throughout the novel.
I was also surprised that the author thought it likely that the source of the pandemic would have been sought out by the same A&E doctor a long while later. Here again, the author is likely to be scuppered by the public's unprecedented access to information on a global pandemic. Genetic sequencing of the virus usually gives researchers an idea of what species the virus mutated from even if Patient Zero is never identified and it is one of the first things that researchers will look at.
The final section imagines how the world would be once a vaccine was created and I found this equally bemusing. Perhaps I am alone here but if only 10% of the male population was left, I find it hard to believe that there would just be a "lottery" or another system for women to have a form of IVF without some form of compulsory sperm donation program? Maybe I missed that part but I would have thought a priority would have been acquiring adequate sperm to repopulate which may have lead to potential human rights infringement protests from males who wanted to retain choice. It was unclear to me why only China would have split into 12 independent states and the Moldovan women would have chosen to imprison all the remaining males for participating in sex trafficking (this seemed particularly broad sweeping). Instead, those with traditional families and immune husbands seemed to carry on as though nothing had changed whilst the risk of population collapse lingered. It also came across that many women were happy to switch to single-sex relationships, as though sexual preference/orientation is purely a product of your environment. If this plotline had been switched to imply the remaining gay men became heterosexual, would there possibly be more raised eyebrows?
Ignoring these scientific logic flaws, my biggest gripe with the novel is probably that even though the author attempted to tell the story of the pandemic from a large cast of characters' perspectives, they all ended up sounding very similar. This meant that I was constantly having to try to remind myself which character was which even though the names and cities were listed at the beginning of each chapter. As far as I remember, there was one male character perspective and the rest were females that seemed to be from very similar socioeconomic backgrounds. I felt as though the women were also of similar ages with a heavy emphasis on how desperate these women are to have children. There lacked the nuance of the perspectives of straight women who chose not to have children for example.
I did read to the end but I think this novel can be summed up as "not for me".
Rating: really liked it
Review to be posted on blog: https://books-are-a-girls-best-friend...
Wholly and Completely Brilliant. Yes, I read a book about a Pandemic in a Pandemic. Some would say that’s in poor taste, and yet, I couldn’t resist. I am not one to shy away from difficult topics and frankly, “The End of Men” is brilliantly written, brilliantly plotted, and gave me a lot to think about given the state of things. For me, this showcased how much that has gone on in our world relating to how things were handled (in real life) compared to how they were handled in the book (which was written before our pandemic hit - though it isn't being released till now).
The year is 2025 during which time a virus breaks out at an A and E in Scotland.
The virus impacts only men. When a man is admitted, he arrives with what appears to be symptoms of the flu. Three hours later, he is gone. Shortly thereafter, several more men lose their lives the same way. All of these men were in the A and E two days prior. Dr. Amanda McLean is a doctor in the A&E who immediately notices the trend and reports it to HPS to no avail.
She is deemed a stark raving lunatic by her peers at HPS and her messages are ignored.
And so it begins. An Outbreak of Epic Proportions.
Once it starts, entire families stay home. Women, men, children. Yet this virus does not discriminate. If you are of the male species, you are at risk, unless you are immune.
Amanda McLean will not rest until she is taken seriously and until she does everything she can to help.
There is Catherine, who after facing a devastating loss, compiles stories of families who have also suffered. There are Elizabeth in the UK and Lisa in Canada, both of whom are scientists and who work to find a vaccine. There is Toby, who is currently on a boat off the coast of Iceland with his identical twin Mark, hoping to stay alive.
These characters and their stories will stay with me. Heartbreaking, yet hopeful at the same time, these characters were a great reminder that we must take stock in each other and be there for each other during these incredibly tough times.
The analysis behind how scientists in this book discovered that the male plague impacted only men (with women being carriers) and why some men were immune was truly fascinating, as was how long it took for a vaccine to be discovered. That alone gave me pause considering where we are at in the world, with this pandemic.
It also made me extremely thankful. I just received the second dose of the vaccine and am so very grateful. All in all, “The End of Men” gave me a lot to ponder. The storyline was extremely well done as was the character development. I truly enjoyed getting to know all of the characters (even though there were a lot to keep track of) and will not forget them anytime soon. Reading this now, made me appreciate life that much more and it gave me a lot of perspective.
I have to give kudos to the author for an incredible accomplishment. This is brilliant, character-driven fiction at its finest. This book will most certainly be on my Goodreads Best-of-List for 2021.
Thank you to Cassie at Putnam Books/GP Putnam’s Sons for the arc via NetGalley.
Posted on Goodreads, Instagram, and Twitter.
Rating: really liked it
2"the end of men, me and meh " stars !!
Thank you to Netgalley, the author and Penguin Random House Canada. This was released April 2021. I am providing an honest review.
A virus in 2025 eradicates nine in ten men. The women are carriers. Ok ok ok...the premise is very cool but how will the author pull this off. She mostly doesn't !
She takes a huge cast of characters and tells their story of losses and how they cope. Except they are mostly exceptionally very bright, progressive, privileged white women. Hmmm a suburban feminist manifesto methinks. Ok ok there is a filipina but she is very motivated and an oppressed Russian woman ok ok and a very bright woman who is black and british. Oh yes a few men too...they are not as bright but they are loved dearly by this bunch of women who want to save them. Gosh is this really just one brave white superwoman taking on all these roles ? Wtf?
The other thing about most of these women is that they all have the same personality sort of like thinking Stepford wives who are all so caring, nurturing and giving. A bit barf worthy here !
The prose is middling and acceptable and oh my goodness don't forget the trans woman nurse in Scotland who is spunky and ever so brave and high functioning !
Anyhow I was mostly bored out of my gourd of these extremely high functioning white women behaving ever so valiantly while at the same time dealing with their immense grief. Oh yes I know there was the Russian and Filipina and Black Woman too but they behaved like strong white American women too.
The premise was excellent .... the attempt was semi-valiant....the execution not so much !
Rating: really liked it
This book has the dubious honour of being the recipient of my first ever Goodreads review. And let me tell you, it’s not a positive one. I bought it as a new release from Waterstones as a treat after nights and I resent the £15 I paid for it.
I love dystopian fiction and the premise of this book sounded fascinating, as well as timely. However, this book is unfortunately ill-researched and will likely be unreadable to anyone with a scientific or medical background.
We are asked to believe that one of the main characters is an A&E consultant. However, she describes a temperature of 38.8c as “barely elevated” (spoiler: that’s actually really quite high for an adult); a matron is busy delivering clinical care in A&E; shocks during resuscitation are delivered with “paddles” (not for 20+ years, my friend) and the consultant claims to have “never seen a case” of MRSA (absolutely ludicrous, I’m a junior doctor and have seen a fair few cases), which is depicted as some untreatable illness, when actually your average local hospital probably has at least one patient on long-term antibiotics for MRSA. I could forgive the odd implausibility but this novel reads like someone’s watched a couple of episodes of Casualty and decided they’re true to life. I’m astounded it’s obviously not had any input or editing by a healthcare professional
given its subject matter. Unfortunately, I could not suspend my disbelief to anywhere near the extent required and have given it away to the charity shop without finishing.
I see that the author is a lawyer at a Magic Circle firm. As a doctor, I wouldn’t attempt to write a pithy legal thriller and publish it without any input from someone who knows how that environment works. I’m astounded such an aggressively advertised release (you don’t get your book displayed at the entrance of Waterstones and stocked in Tesco as a debut novelist readily) wasn’t much better researched and edited. A real waste of an interesting idea.
Rating: really liked it
Dr Amanda MacLean in a Glasgow hospital treats a male patient presenting with flu whose body suddenly shuts down. She investigates and realises patient zero came in from Bute a few days earlier .... this starts The Plague of 2025 which only kills men. The story is told via multiple points of view worldwide.
Yes, it’s another pandemic novel and a debut! I really like the format of the book, although there are a lot of characters it clearly shows the dramatic escalation into fear and chaos that this pandemic brings across the continents. This is a four horseman of the apocalypse, epically biblical crisis in scale with the first half showing the horrifying stages of the pandemic and the second depicting the fallout and survival via a vaccine. There are some very good characters especially Amanda who is dogged and intuitive and I also have a particular liking for Dawn, the sixty something civil servant working in British Intelligence whose wry humour is a welcome relief. The novel is extremely well written and the style engaging. It clearly shows the devastating and overwhelming pain and sadness of loss, it’s moving and poignant as it humanises the victims otherwise it’s numbers of such enormity your brain cannot compute. Some characters are very reflective especially on life pre-pandemic which is heartbreaking. The impact worldwide is interesting as woman have to fill roles from refuse collectors to soldiers to world leaders. Especially thought provoking is the drastic action some countries take to protect male babies and how sperm is allocated to ensure the populations future. I like the end as it reinforces the importance of love and remembrance and putting a face to those that are gone but not forgotten.
Overall, yes, this is a devil rides out scenario but it’s also very intriguing, extremely well written and does make you reflect on what’s important as we go through this pandemic.
With thanks to Harper Collins UK/Harper Fiction for the arc for an honest review.
Rating: really liked it
This had me feeling ✨e m o t i o n s✨
Literally tearing up at every chapter.
I was blown away by the scope of this story. This author wrote this BEFORE the pandemic and somehow managed to encapsulate it perfectly while adding on a more harrowing twist.
I found myself tearing up at so many parts of this book. It kept pace so well and kept the action moving while also bringing in so much grief and desperation.
I loved the scientific look at how the world is set up for men and how women suffer by this. The size of smart phones to fit a man's hand and be overpowered by a women's. The uniforms for police, firefighter and EMT's to be designed for men and women just have to wear the smallest option and often end up dying from not having the protection they deserve. The standard heart attack symptoms only providing examples of male symptoms. So women end up dying because medical professionals are not equipped with recognizing the symptoms in time. Seat belts and air bags and so much more being designated to protect men over women is just the tip of the iceberg in this book and I loved every second of it.
*****************************
Immediately rereading to annotate cause I loved this so much more than I anticipated.
Rating: really liked it
I mean couldn't we have gotten this pandemic instead of Covid-19?? JK OOP😅
Top tier Ms Sweeney!!! Great Debut! 4 Stars to you for effectively doing what the movement has been trying to do for years-
BRINGING DOWN THE PATRIARCHY!! I have no idea where to begin with this incredibly well written book. A book that griped me by its title alone when I first heard of it and later captivated from the minute I started it.
When I first read the blurb of The End of Men I was intrigued! I mean who wouldn't be? Imagine a world completely free of 'The Other Gender' Wow. Reminds me of a time when a similar question was posed on Twitter- ''Imagine for 24hrs there were no men in the world, what would/could you do with your day?'' and ladies went wild with responses.
-Go running at night without fear of creeps
-Stop living in fear
-Walk around naked (This was a pretty common response, still a misdemeanor ladies lol)
-Dance freely at the club
-Finish sentences!!!!!!!
-Get promoted (Maybe not in a day, but I got the gist of it)
The list was honestly endless and I related to all of them... Because let's face it, we live in a Man's world no matter how many strides we make in our plight of equality.
‘The world is closing down’ Sounds familiar? Covid19 anybody, I remember being holed up in my studio wishing desperately that I could be back home in Kenya with my family. I had this anxiety of dying alone and no one would find my body until it was too late. I used to facetime my mom before I go to bed and make her watch me sleep just because I wanted her presence with me. (Weird I know...!!)
‘I have never felt so powerful. This must be what men used to feel like. My mere physical presence is enough to terrify someone into running. No wonder they used to get drunk on it.’ Who run the world?? Girls!! I'm not gonna lie the feminist aspect to this fictional pandemic was appealing. I'm not going to apologize for that, I mean it sucks that all their sons, husbands/boyfriends, dads and male friends died but WOW, finally they were at the top of the food chain, calling the shots! Hells YEAH!!!! I'd say finally the universe snapped and decided to cleanse itself.. THE PATRIARCHY HAS FALLEN!! 🙊🙊
'Turns out, one of the best way to fulfil the career dreams of your 25yr old self barely dared to imagine is to be a woman during the plague' We saw women train to get drafted in the army, women in politics coming up with policies that we only ever dream of being effected, women who previously were deemed incapable taking up multiple jobs performed by men and doing it competently and even better! Back to the real world though, I know I will have to work 100x harder to prove myself worthy of that dream job and even if I do get it, I'm going to take home probably 30% less compared to my male counterpart in a similar position.
I breezed through this one honestly, I thoroughly enjoyed it though it sort of had a lag in the middle due to the very many characters POVs. I would have wished for the author to stick to just a couple of the key characters that I formed some semblance of attachment to like Catherine, Amanda, Dawn and Elizabeth. But hey, I seriously have zero complaints.
Though my MVP was Frances, talk about loving someone so truly and fiercely you would go to the ends of the earth to ensure their survival.
Also how amazing is it that the author came up with the concept and the draft for this book in 2018 and then boom! Were hit with a goddamned pandemic, I would've the freaked the fuck out beloveds!
I can't wait to read more of Ms Sweeney-Baird's books!
Rating: really liked it
3.5 starsThis was so good!!! Really great pandemic book, hard to believe this was written before covid. I think it had too many characters for me to really connect with any of them, but I really enjoyed the thought provoking discussion in this book about what a world would look like without men.
I read this for a sci-fi reading vlog, which you can see here: https://youtu.be/uQL4pr2Z5Ac
Rating: really liked it
Sweeny-Baird has tried to paint a world where a male-specific Plague has ravaged the world, killing ~90% of the male population. Sounds interesting; I wasn’t sure if this was going to be more social commentary or thriller, and turns out it does neither because it's so bad.
There’s are sooooooo many places you could go with this plot line, and unfortunately the author has decided to focus on multiple middle aged, highly educated women with children that spend the entire book pining about their dead sons and husbands. Bechel test, who? What about women that don’t live in the UK, USA or Canada (there’s one Russian and two Malay chapters out of ~seventy chapters; the majority of the rest are middle aged white women). Does South America or Africa or the rest of Asia even exist? What about the viewpoint of female children, what about poorer families, what about a POV from a world leader? Why is China the only country to have a civil war and not any other country? What happens to the economy with men dying? How does faith and religion change? Do societies come together or fracture? What happens to people in the middle of school? What happens to the environment? I’d have liked chapters from the POV of dying men. Why do I have to listen to a few women wax poetic about their young sons and perfect, loving, sweet, generous, gorgeous, strong, daring husbands for 400 pages? If a character study was the goal, then the author should have stuck with a single POV narrator and not switched between ~20 characters with such short chapters.
There were also many smaller things that didn’t add up to me, and added to the reading frustration.
- In the second chapter an ER doctor realizes she has a plague on her hands after eight patients. Seems quick to assume.
- A Canadian virologist professor (top of her field; ends up making the vaccine) doesn’t hear about the Plague until 5k men have died in the UK. Don’t you think she would have heard about it earlier? The author also paints this character ridiculously. When she discovers the vaccine, she says “Yes, I am in fact a God.” I rolled my eyes.
- A newspaper article in one of the chapters claims that most of America doesn’t know what’s happening in the UK even though, by that point, 100,000 men have died. In our news culture? Really? CNN would have been on it after 20 deaths.
- NOBODY wants to figure out the source of the Plague. Isn’t that what news sources and doctors and virologists would all want to know? Guess not. Only one person thinks to look for the source, and only after more than a year into the outbreak.
- I don’t think the author has done any sort of scientific analysis. Her explanation for why the Plague only impacts men could have been a hypothesis an 8th grader came out with.
- There is only one chapter that talks about gender and sex. There is only one other chapter that features a gay relationship, and that’s because all the men are gone and she’s lonely.
- One UK woman goes out on a date to a restaurant with an immune man during the height of the pandemic. Further through the book, a government official talks about restaurants are closed and how the UK should open them so people could feel normal for a little bit. So….. which is it? There were multiple instances of these kinds of contradictions.
I’ve read close to 100 books so far in 2021 and this is the one of the worst. Top three least favorite, for sure.
I (regrettably) voluntarily obtained a digital version of this book free from Netgalley and Penguin Group in exchange for an honest review.
Rating: really liked it
Look how far we’ve come, I think to myself. Look how we have survived.
I’ve noticed a couple titles in the last year or so whose storylines centre the absence/nonexistence of men (e.g., Afterland, The Mercies). Naturally, I was very intrigued at such a premise.
The End of Men is my first foray into this trope. This novel chronicles the fictional events of 2025–2031 as a virulent pandemic sweeps across the world and decimates the male population. We follow over a dozen interweaving POVs, each illustrating how the world reels and comes to terms in all its realms—in love, economics, politics, medicine; we watch as this world rebuilds.
I thought it would be draining to read a book about a pandemic, but the opposite actually occurred—I got a glimpse into an even more terrifying, dystopic reality. I was able to say, “Things are bad right now, but at least they’re not
this bad.”
This being the Male Plague, with its 90% mortality rate, its ability to stay alive on surfaces for 36+ hours, its rapid spread (1.8x that of HIV).
Many thanks to NetGalley and Penguin Random House Canada for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️
The best word I have for this book is scattered. It’s a quality that both enhances and detracts from the novel. How do the scattered POVs detract from the story?
The End of Men switches dizzyingly between more than a dozen characters’ POVs. For most of the book, each character’s voice felt vaguely the same; it became difficult to keep track of who was who, where, doing what. I took to actually writing down characters’ names and defining features to differentiate between them.
Unexpectedly though, as the book progressed and the individual storylines interwove—with a recurrent focus on Amanda’s and Catherine’s plots—
I found myself appreciating the diversity of perspectives. I liked how they eventually dovetailed and allowed the reader to track disparate experiences of the Male Plague.
Catherine is a social anthropologist who grapples with infertility both before and after the onset of the pandemic; as she mourns her loving husband and young son, she sets out to record stories of the Plague.
Amanda is an A&E doctor in Glasgow (in the Independent Republic of Scotland) who discovers the Plague’s existence—and is gaslit for trying to alert the world to its devastation.
Lisa is a professor of virology at the University of Toronto and eventual creator of the long-awaited, life-changing vaccine—only, she has decided to monetize its release.
Elizabeth is a junior CDC virologist who travels to London to help with vaccine development; to her surprise, she finds love in a world that seems devoid of it.
Dawn works at the British Intelligence Services, one of the few Black women employed; she moves her way up the ranks, and through her POV we see the economic and political impacts of the Plague. There’s also
Rosamie, a Filipina nanny for a wealthy Singaporean nanny;
Toby, a 60yo English man who becomes stranded on a cruise ship off Iceland;
Morven, a Scottish woman who runs a hostel that is forced to take in dozens of orphaned boys; and many more.
Sound confusing? Not gonna lie, it
was.
How do the scattered POVs enhance the story?
At the same time, I found it
fascinating to see the distinct ways in which the Plague, the loss of 90% of all men, reshaped the world. This was made possible by the panoply of POVs.
There is a scramble to
rebuild the workforce, especially in professions formerly dominated by men; women find themselves at the helm of garbage collecting, electrical repair, army service, policy-making, global leadership. Elections are dominated by women; Canada has its first (full-term) female prime minister.
There is immense
political upheaval. For example, China has dissolved into twelve democratic states because the male-dominated army and Communist Party was ravaged, allowing rebel parties to take charge of governance.
There are
difficult decisions to be made about childbearing—for example, how to best protect male infants from viral exposure? New Zealand decides that, for the safety of he newborn boys, they will non-consensually remove babies from their mothers.
The Plague also necessarily has ramifications for
romance and sexuality, including the smash-hit success of a dating app exclusively for women meeting women; many women deciding not to date; the devastation to queer communities, gay and trans folk especially.
◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️
The last thing I’ll mention about this book is that I didn’t really jibe with the writing style.
The prose in this book isn’t particularly artful or eloquent, rather favouring sentences that are curt and clipped and overly to-the-point.As its name implies, there isn’t much subtlety in
The End of Men—not the prose, not the premise. At times I was left with the distinct impression that the brevity of the sentences did not fit the scale of tragedy they described.
Other times I had to suppress a laugh at the absurdity. Take this description of a fictional and devastating riot at the San Francisco airport, for example:
My colleague Andrew arrives and shoots the second shooter in the arm. I get ahold of myself, get off the floor and shoot the first shooter in the shoulder. At the same time, Andrew shoots him in the head.
The full passage uses “shoot” (or some related word like “shooter”)
thirteen times. The effect is ABSURD. There is none of the horror, the calamity, that should accompany sniper activity at the airport. Instead, I wanted to laugh. I shoot the shooter. You shoot the shooter. The shooter shoots.
The book also features several news articles penned by a character by the name of Maria Ferreira. She’s described as the Washington Post’s former science editor, a woman who was twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize—and yet her writing made me cringe; it’s
devoid of lyricism, eloquence, impact. The writing in these news articles was so simple, so heavy-handed, as to feel immature. (It doesn’t help that I’ve just finished a phenom book by Lulu Miller, a science writer for NPR, whose quick turns of phrase and clever, vivid prose put
The End of Men to shame. Not really a great comparison.)
◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️
BOTTOM LINE: I wasn’t particularly impressed with the prose (or science) in
The End of Men, but if you can acclimate to the dizzying swirl of character POVs, you’ll be rewarded with an interesting exploration into a post-pandemic world without men.
Rating: really liked it
Jahreshighlight 🙏🏼❤️
Rating: really liked it
[suicidal ideation/thoughts/non-described actual suicides, detailed scenes of grief, loss of loved ones, medical descriptions of deaths (hide spoiler)]
Rating: really liked it
I want to thank NetGalley and Penguin Random House Canada for this amazing book of speculative fiction. Its author wrote this brilliant, thought-provoking debut in pre-COVID days during 2018 and 2019 from a vivid imagination and research. Little did she know that by the time her book was ready for publication, that we would be experiencing a true pandemic of death, hospitalizations, lockdowns, distancing and mask-wearing. At the time of writing my review, Canada is undergoing the worst spike in cases since the beginning of the COVID pandemic, with new fearsome variations becoming widespread. Since we have to import all vaccines, there is a slow rollout and locally up to 4 months wait for a second vaccine. It was ironic that in the book, the first vaccine was invented by a female scientist in Canada wanting great wealth and glory from selling her vaccine to the government and then worldwide.
The events and emotions the author describes in this book seem very believable and frightening. I can't speak for the science involved that is well explained for the reader. With the rapidly mutating and increasing variations of concern, I had to wonder if a gender-specific strain could be possible.
The author speaks of a near-future time in 2025 when a lethal disease starts in the Republic of Scotland and is deadly only for men and boys. Everyone becomes a carrier, and it spreads rapidly to other nations and continents with devastating results. Only about 10% of males are immune. For the others, death rapidly follows the infection. Dr. Amanda MacLean, working in a hospital in Glasgow, futility treats the first patient (Patient Zero) and soon realizes other men are exhibiting the same symptoms. She reports her belief that she has witnessed the beginning of a plague, but her concerns are dismissed as hysteria and ignored.
As death and chaos spread globally, we are taken on a journey into the hearts and minds of various individuals worldwide as they cope with profound loss and grief, the necessity of restoring some social order, and the difficulty of rapidly producing an effective vaccine. The resulting loss of men and boys profoundly affects women and girls left behind and on society and nations. It challenges ethics, morality, fertility issues, and the meaning of family. Women now are needed to fill mens' jobs in government, manual labour, technology, the military, medical and scientific fields, etc.
There are experiments to seize baby boys at birth and isolate them in hopes they can be saved, and older boys not yet displaying symptoms are placed in remote areas to survive the pandemic. Women wanting to bear a child have been told they are to be chosen by lottery for artificial medical insemination, but many hopes are dashed. It is a lie, as the government is actually determining their selection by socio-economic status, age, and health and not by chance. The scarcity of men leads to an online dating site for women to meet other women. Food is rationed, and there are arguments about whether junk food and sweets be included for the comfort they bring.
After the vaccine is introduced, people can once again travel when their country is 99.9% vaccinated, and their destination is the same number vaccinated. Many countries do not meet this qualification. China has fractured into several different states, many democratic and run by women. Terrorist organizations no longer inspire fear since the male terrorists are gone.
I did find this a slow read because it was told from the experiences and emotions of numerous people across the planet. I thought this slowed down the narrative and detracted somewhat from the flow of the story. I can understand the reason for this, but it made the plot feel disjointed. I wondered if the narrative concentrated on several key characters, it would be a shorter, smoother read. It might have increased my emotional involvement and made it feel that it progressed at a faster pace. Nevertheless, this was a stunning, thought-provoking novel, and I hope we never experience anything like this in real life. It is a book I will long remember. The author has written an amazing first book, and I hope that she writes more novels, and I would definitely read them.
3.5 stars raised to 4.
Rating: really liked it
Thank you to NetGalley and Putnam Books for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Even though this wasn’t one of the best books I’ve read this year, it was a really good book for me to read right now. This year has pulled me in and out of reading slumps a few times and a fast, easy, engaging read like
The End of Men was exactly what I needed. Although it might seem counterintuitive that a book about a fictional global pandemic would perk me up during an actual global pandemic, strangely enough, that’s exactly what happened.
The End of Men invites comparison to two of my favorite apocalyptic novels,
The Book of the Unnamed Midwife and
World War Z, both of which I read (or reread) this year, so they were fresh in my mind reading this one. From its blurb,
The End of Men seems like it will be
Unnamed Midwife in reverse: Instead of a plague that kills women and children, it tells the story of a plague that kills only men. And its multiple first-person narratives immediately reminded me of
World War Z. These comparisons were probably what doomed this book to a middling three-star rating for me; it just couldn’t compete.
Unnamed Midwife’s greatest strength is its protagonist. By comparison,
The End of Men features many different point-of-view characters, most of them women, a few of whom are more central than the rest. Most were good, memorable characters, but no single character was the sole focus of the book and so I lacked that strong connection. I also didn’t feel like
The End of Men’s exploration of feminist issues was nearly as well done as
Unnamed Midwife.
On the other hand,
World War Z has just as many characters as
The End of Men, but instead of having their stories chopped up into many short chapters, as in
The End of Men, most were told all at once in what read like a collection of connected short stories. Additionally, the different stories in
World War Z represented the most exciting, most emotional, or most memorable part of each character’s experience, whereas most of the chapters in
The End of Men read like slices of life during a pandemic, although there were some exceptions.
This book would have had more potential as a four- or five-star read if Christina Sweeney-Baird had focused on the one or two characters with the strongest narratives, which in my opinion are Catherine and Amanda. Their stories were more emotional and introspective – Catherine’s brought me to tears – and told two very different perspectives, one of an ordinary woman who is profoundly affected by the Plague and the other of a doctor who was there when the Plague began.
My final complaint, a more minor problem that nonetheless took me right out of the story, is with the fictional news articles Sweeney-Baird scatters throughout the novel. If you need any proof that there’s a big difference between writing fiction and writing the news, look no further. Sweeney-Baird wrote an engaging and enjoyable novel here, but she doesn’t know how to write a news article. The ones she included weren’t at all realistic, even to someone like me with no background in journalism. (I also don’t think some of the science and medicine in this book was very accurate but I am even less qualified to talk about that.)
Despite all my criticisms and unfavorable comparisons, I wouldn’t call this a bad book. It was fast-paced, although the ending did drag on a bit, and tough to put down. And there were shining moments even outside Catherine and Amanda’s chapters. There were some especially memorable minor characters: Morven, a Scottish former hostel owner; Rosamie, a Filipino nanny; Helen, a mother of three girls; and Lisa, a virology professor. The parts about governments figuring out ways to cope with the effects of the Plague were really interesting to me. If you’re considering reading this one, I say give it a shot.
