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    Women Talking
    Women Talking
    Women Talking
    Audiobook5 hours

    Women Talking

    Written by Miriam Toews

    Narrated by Matthew Edison

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    A transformative and necessary work--as completely unexpected as it is inspired--by the award-winning author of the bestselling novels All My Puny Sorrows and A Complicated Kindness. Based on actual events that happened between 2005 and 2009 in a remote Mennonite community where more than 100 girls and women were drugged unconscious and assaulted in the night by what they were told (by the men of the colony) were "ghosts" or "demons," Miriam Toews' bold and affecting novel Women Talking is an imagined response to these real events. The novel takes place over forty-eight hours, as eight women gather in secret in a neighbour's barn while the men are in a nearby town posting bail for the attackers. They have come together to debate, on behalf of all the women and children in the community, whether to stay or leave before the men return. Taking minutes is the one man trusted and invited by the women to witness the conversation--a former outcast whose own surprising story is revealed as the women speak. By turns poignant, witty, acerbic, bitter, tender, devastating, and heartbreaking, the voices in this extraordinary novel are unforgettable. Toews has chosen to focus the novel tightly on a particular time and place, and yet it contains within its 48 hours and setting inside a hayloft an entire vast universe of thinking and feeling about the experience of women (and therefore men, too) in our contemporary world. In a word: astonishing.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateApr 2, 2019
    ISBN9781501998782
    Author

    Miriam Toews

    Miriam Toews is the author of the bestselling novels All My Puny Sorrows, Summer of My Amazing Luck, A Boy of Good Breeding, A Complicated Kindness, The Flying Troutmans, Irma Voth, Fight Night, and one work of nonfiction, Swing Low: A Life. She is winner of the Governor General's Award for Fiction, the Libris Award for Fiction Book of the Year, the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, and the Writers' Trust Engel/Findley Award. She lives in Toronto.

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    Reviews for Women Talking

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    • 5/5
      It was such a bittersweet joy to bear witness to these women's stories through Toews' precise voice. She makes you feel as though you are sitting in the barn's loft, own your own milk jug, rooting for the women of Malachna to own their sense of resilience and forge a place of their own in the world. You poignantly feel these women's frustration as their conversation echoes many secular women's plights.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Loved it. Not for everyone. I bought the physical book after this listen. The prose is beautiful, the situation and conversations difficult but genuine, the characters interesting. Can't stop thinking about it.....

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Loved the ethical and philosophical discussions, interwoven with humor, in this wonderful novel. Provocative and thoughtful.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      A nuanced look at a Mennonite community that is facing an impossible decision. Loosely based on real events, I was moved by the descriptions of the women as the decide their fate. The story is told from the POV of a male school teacher, which gives us the feeling of looking in from the outside. The story feels simple, but the result is a powerful look at the complicated relationships these women have built in their tight-knit group.
    • 5/5
      I truly enjoyed this book. The writing was beautiful and engaging. I loved Salome she was ‘bout that life!
    • 5/5
      Heavy topic, but it is necessary. I really appreciated all of the characters’ points of view and what their experiences brought to the discussion. I especially enjoyed the moments of levity when the discussions went off the rails. And the fact that this whole story was narrated by a man, with the women’s own words, but that he felt he needed to add in his own background in some places. These were philosophical discussions even though the women were not educated.
    • 4/5
      I wonder what became of the women. I like to think that they were able to thrive on their own
    • 4/5
      This is about a group of Mennonite women in Bolivia who, for years, have been drugged and sexually abused as they sleep at night. One of them finally wakes up during the assault so she realizes the pain and damage they have all felt are not from psychosomatic reasons or visits from the devil but from abuse by the honored husbands and sons of the community. When all the women realize this they are reasonably outraged and are told by the head of the community that they must forgive the men or they won't be able to go to heaven. They are mostly illiterate, they don't even speak the language of their country (as Mennonites they speak a kind of old German). They've never left their community or made decisions on their own, and they have to decide whether to forgive the men or leave the community. This is a novel based on real-life occurrences.
    • 4/5
      Between 2005 and 2009, in a remote Mennonite colony in Bolivia named the Manitoba Colony, after the province in Canada, many girls and women would wake in the morning feeling drowsy and in pain, their bodies bruised and bleeding, having been attacked in the night. The attacks were attributed to ghosts and demons. Some members of the community felt the women were being made to suffer by God or Satan as punishment for their sins; many accused the women of lying for attention or to cover up adultery; still others believed everything was the result of wild female imagination.

      Eventually, it was revealed that eight men from the colony had been using an animal anesthetic to knock their victims unconscious and rape them. In 2011, these men were convicted in a Bolivian court and received lengthy prison sentences. In 2013, while the convicted men were still in jail, it was reported that similar assaults and other sexual abuses were continuing to take place in the colony.

      Women Talking is both a reaction through fiction to these true-life events, and an act of female imagination.

      Thought-provoking, at the least. The backstory of the colony played out like a lot of other religious cult stories, probably on purpose. At least the Mennonites aren't polygamous like the Mormon offshoots - the women don't have to compete for a single husband, and it helps the sense of camaraderie. So even if they didn't all hate men, they were united in the belief that what was done to them was monstrous, and that there was something very wrong with the colony.

      The women's (lack of) education is what allows Toews to pull off the platonic dialogue shtick without a modern reader finding it too quaint. August injected a few modernisms that seemed largely ignored, but maybe I wasn't reading closely enough.

      The book didn't end the way I thought it would, which is probably a good thing (the ending I expected would have been horrifically depressing, but bearable because it would be expected, if that makes sense).

      So I liked the platonic dialogue part, but a lot of the descriptions would have worked better in an out-and-out play format, I think. With the way body movements were described so intimately, I feel it would have felt less gross as play direction. And I wouldn't have to wonder where dialogue ended - there's nothing wrong with quotation marks!

      I'm still trying to figure out August's purpose in the book. I'm not angry about it, but I don't understand all of it.
    • 5/5
      From 2005-2009, women at the Manitoba Mennonite Colony in Bolivia were drugged and raped routinely at night. Inspired by this story and her own childhood in a Mennonite town in Canada, Toews has imagined her own response to women's oppression in isolated religious communities.

      This is a work of art, not a work of history or anthropology. Some Mennonites have criticized Toews' portrayal and even as an outsider, I got the sense that she was fusing her own childhood knowledge with her outside knowledge of Bolivian Mennonites. As art, and not as history, Toews also feels free to have the characters express themselves in ways that are not necessarily true to life (arguing about patriarchy and manifestoes).

      The novel is structured as the minutes of a meeting of 8 women in the colony, trying to decide whether to stay or to go. The meeting is recorded by a man, as the woman is unable to write. August serves the function of translator--translating the women from Plautdietsch to English--and observer, but also as a filter. Even here, the women's thoughts and voices are recorded as a man perceives them. As someone who has spent time outside the colony, he also functions as a buffer and cultural translator between the women--who have barely seen the world and cannot read a map--and the reader.

      The writing is superb--the setup is almost stage-like, with relatively little action, so the quality of the book lives or dies in the delivery. Toews is mordantly funny: "She once explained to me that, as a Molotschnan, she had everything she wanted; all she had to do was convince herself that she wanted very little."

      The point here is less the conclusion, and more how they arrive at it. What Toews has imagined here is a situation where the victims have agency. They can speak about what has happened to them, what they believe, how they feel. They can take action, unlike their real life counterparts.
    • 5/5
      Short but full. What does it mean to forgive? To be brave and stand up for what you believe in even when it means going against what you believe in? The illiterate women in this story debate their faith, their beliefs, their life, with such conviction and passion even though they have faced the most horrific betrayals and abuse. Yet they are so strong and stalwart and broken and human. An excellent piece that should be adapted for the stage.

      2020: Listened to the book on audio, and it's still amazing.
    • 4/5
      The women in a Mennonite community must decide what to do when their rapists are being bailed out by members of their own village. August, whose is back after his family left the community when he was twelve, is taking "minutes" for the women while they talk over their options. Do they leave? Stay? Fight? They struggle with their faith, fear, and friendships. The decisions are made more difficult because they do not read, write, or even know where they are.

      As I was reading this, I kept thinking that August was an unreliable narrator. It's a bit hard to read some of what he writes, due to lack of punctuation, but he keeps telling us he's writing as fast as he can. The sins of this community are far reaching, old, and numerous. There are some unanswered questions about Bishop Peters for me that I wish were clarified, but it's not his story. I will be thinking about this one for a long time.
    • 5/5
      A short novel that would make an excellent play, should anyone care to develop it, given that there are 3 distinct acts, little change of scene and that it is almost entirely dialogue based. A group of women, from three generations, in a remote Mennonite community in Bolivia, have 48 hours to discuss what actions they should take to respond to a series of sexual assaults and rapes they have been subject to from the male members of their community, under cover of darkness, drugged by nightshade and told they were the result of visitation from demons. Should they leave, should they stay and fight, or should they do nothing?In these circumstances, Ms Toews is to be congratulated for finding such unique voices for all of her female characters. One might of thought that given the uniformity of their experience, extremely limited knowledge of the world, illiteracy and general lack of education, the women might be cut from the one cloth. And yet that is very much not the case. Each of the women, from teenager to matriarch, has her own fears, anxieties and hopes, her own thresholds of anger and humour, her own small ways of subverting the system, and her own internal world. Because of this, although the subject matter of the novel is depressing (especially when the rape of children is concerned), the novel is a joy. The reader roots for the women to succeed, on their own terms, whatever success looks like to them. As such it is highly recommended. Minus half a star for the slightly contrived ending and also for a narrator that doesn't really fit. I realise that it its necessary, in a group of illiterate characters, to insert someone who is literate, but the narrator's presence in the community, and back story, doesn't really work for me. However that doesn't detract from the power and the joy of the book .
    • 3/5
      Read for #bookriot #readharder #12 memoir from a different religion.

      Complicated to review this one. Interesting based on real life story of a patriarchal society where the women are abused and wrestle with their upbringing and their religion on how to handle the situation. Well done in bringing out some key points of the Mennonite religion, and some key intricacies of how women are treated under the guise of religion. Toews was raised Mennonite and captures the basic tenets and some possible implications very well. But the women were treated poorly not because of the religion and I hope readers understand that. Any society that inhibits the growth and education of girls and women runs the exact same risks, and deserves all the scrutiny possible in the hopes that we no longer allow these groups to cloister themselves from the public eye.

      Style wise, this was a tough read. Lots of repetition, required to get the story set correctly but made it hard to read. I did a lot of skimming. There appears to be a lot of animosity here that the chosen narrator was male but if you read the full novel, it is apparent why that choice was made. It enhanced the plot and allowed the development of a male character in a book that might otherwise been just a male bashing exposition. The narrators pain and character arc were well developed and explained. I appreciate what the extra perspective brought to the story.

      Recommended for people who are curious to understand why women stay in untenable positions, but only if they are fully prepared to struggle through their own biases to truly understand.
    • 4/5
      A group of Mennonite women in Bolivia join forces to make a decision as to what their action should be when it's been brought to light they have been drugged and raped, some as young as 3 years old, by men of their colony. Peters, the leader of the colony, will not allow outsiders to help the women. They take matters into their own hands but are torn by their religious beliefs and the safety of the daughters. With a somewhat outcast male member as secretary of the meeting, whose minutes make up a huge portion of the book, the women hem and haw over their choices. Their options are 1. Do nothing, 2. Stay and fight or 3. Leave. During their sometimes heated discussions the reader discovers the women of this colony are illiterate, have no electricity, are valuable only to produce children, cook and work the fields. Everything they know and believe has come from their fathers and husbands.They ultimately come to a decision but at times the story reminds one of Animal Farm with their manifesto, revolution and songs. The difference here is, although childlike to a fault, they have what chickens, cows and pigs do not and that's what fuels their decision with, hopefully, long lasting results.The blurb from the back dust jacket says, this book "is an imagined response to these real events"
    • 5/5
      This story is based on real events in a remote Mennonite community, in which more than a hundred women and girls were drugged and assaulted during the night by what the men of the colony told them were ghosts or demons. Eventually, one of the women succeeds in outsmarting her attacker, and the truth is exposed.This book is about an imagined response to this, in which eight women, over forty-eight hours, talk about what they can do and will choose to do about what's happened, while the men of the colony are in a nearby town trying to post bail for the men involved in the assaults. It's a challenging listen, but also fascinating.Because the women are illiterate, they recruit one of the few men they trust, the schoolteacher, August Epp, to write down their discussions to create a record. Epp's own connection to this colony, where he was born, is tenuous and complicated, and the other men give him about as much respect as they give the women.They're right to trust him; his sympathies and respect lie with them, not the other men of the colony.As the women talk, in several meetings over the forty-eight hours they have to make their decision, we get to know them, the variety of their personalities, interests, and concerns, as well as, slowly, August Epp's own history, interests, and concerns. Our understanding of the women, from teenagers to grandmothers, and of Epp's experiences in and out of the Mennonite colony, and through each of these viewpoints, we begin to get an understanding of the Mennonite colony as a whole, and its relationship to the wider world.The women's story is a hard one, and Epp's isn't an easy one either, but it is compelling.Highly recommended.I bought this audiobook.
    • 4/5
      The strengths and weaknesses of this are six of one, half-dozen of the other. As 8 illiterate women of 3 generations try to decide to leave the only world they've ever known or stay and fight, as recorded by a man, a necessary outsider to distance passions of participants. Diversions and personal infighting seem to overwhelm the purpose of the meeting which is all too real. We have all been in this meeting and all felt like cutting our foot off to escape. But what the women decide and why is there and is important.
    • 4/5
      This is a novel but it is what Miriam Toews thinks might have happened in response to real incidents that took place on a Mennonite colony in Bolivia between 2005 and 2009. One review headline called this book a Mennonite #MeToo Novel.Here in Manitoba we have many Mennonites as it is one of the places that promised Mennonites fleeing from persecution in Russia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries land, autonomy and freedom from serving in the military. That is probably why the Mennonite community highlighted in this book was called the Manitoba colony even though it was located in rural Bolivia. This community was far more restrictive than most of the Mennonite communities in Canada. Women were kept illiterate and did not travel beyond the colony's borders. They did not handle money even though their quilt making brought in a significant amount of funds for the colony. Men, which included boys over the age of 13, made all the decisions and women were taught to obey their husbands. So, it was a very repressive society for women. But during the period between 2005 and 2009 women and girls (one as young as 3 years old) were knocked unconscious with a animal sedative and then raped and assaulted. Almost every female was assaulted during this period. The women complained to the community authorities but nothing was actually done until some women set a trap to catch one of the perpetrators. He gave up the names of eight other men and all nine were charged mostly to remove the men from experiencing the wrath of the community's women. When the novel opens the perpetrators are in jail in the city and all the men of the community have gone there to arrange for bail. The head of the community, Bishop Peters, has declared that when they return the men will ask for forgiveness and the women must grant forgiveness so that everyone can enter heaven when they die. Peters has also declared that if the women don't forgive the men then the women will have to leave the community. The book is ostensibly a written record of the discussions the women have to decide whether they will stay and forgive, stay and fight, or leave. Since all of the women are illiterate they have drafted the one man in the community who remained behind, teacher August Epp. The women don't see August as a threat because he is not like all the other men as he can't till a field or castrate a pig. So August sits in on the discussions and records not just the words but also the emotions and background information. Despite being illiterate the women are not stupid and they debate the options with logic and passion and even wit. This probably is not an accurate portrayal of what happened at the community. In fact, a woman of my acquaintance who was raised as a Mennonite says that there is no way a man would be allowed to sit in on the discussions in a traditional place like the one portrayed. Nevertheless it is a useful vehicle to express what the women must have gone through in their minds and in their conversations. I listened to the audiobook which was narrated very ably by Mathew Edison.
    • 4/5
      Speculative fiction based on a real case in Bolivia of a sequestered community of Mennonites where a group of men sedated and raped women of all ages in the community. The narrator is a male who returned to the community after being excommunicated with his parents as a child. The community is so isolated that they speak their own language based on old German and the women are not allowed to attend school, so they are illiterate and know nothing of the world outside of the confines of their small patriarchal, authoritarian community.The substance of the book is the discussions by two families of women, three generations from each family, who are discussing what their alternatives are in response to the actions of the men. They are able to meet because Bishop Peters and other men are in town, trying to raise bail for the alleged perpetrators of the rapes. They ended up in civil action because of one of the men was nearly murdered by one of the women victims.The narrative is so subtle that the horrifying situation that the women are in sinks in slowly with the reader. The all encompassing violence of the men, perpetrated by the absolute power they hold over the community.One telling quote related by hearsay from Bishop Peters in response to a newspaper clipping about what had happened to the women of the colony: "Dump men in the middle of nowhere, confine them, abuse them, suspend them in limbo, and this is what you get."I give it 3.5 stars, mostly because there is some inconsistency in the language, vocabulary, and ideas that the women might have had available to them.
    • 2/5
      Unpopular opinion - this just wasn‘t for me. Maybe because the “narrator” was male; I wanted more about the female characters; for being so short it seemed redundant. It‘s horrific to think this is based off real life events and I applaud the author for bringing what happened to light.
    • 4/5
      The fact that this novel is based on a true story makes me shudder. It takes place in a Bolivian village occupied by a Mennonite community. There have been a series of what are described as "ghost rapes" where women and girls as young as three (!) have been sexually assaulted after being drugged while they sleep during the night. After much hesitation by the man at the head of this sect, the police are finally called in to investigate and several men have been arrested. While all of the men are either under arrest or away at the main city where the men are being held trying to arrange bail, the male school teacher is secretly taking the minutes of the meeting of the women involved as they try to list the pros and cons of leaving or staying. The problems are immense. They are illiterate for the most part and have never set foot outside of their small community. As they discuss their choices it becomes obvious that the patriarchy has left them defenseless and with few options. Highly recommended.
    • 4/5
      I thoroughly enjoyed Women Talking. The story may not be what readers expect. It starts after the abuse and ends before the readers know exactly what happens to them. It is truly just the period of time when the women are talking. The book is great because of the content and how it makes the reader feel and think. One can't help but to think how they would react in this situation - it's unimaginable. The writing is a bit circular, but I didn't find it distracting from the story.
    • 4/5
      In a remote Mennonite community in South America, women, girls and even toddlers are waking up with unexplained injuries and coming down with inexplicable STDs. The leader of the community explains it to them that they were violated by demons as the consequences of their own sin, but it is eventually discovered that some of the men are drugging the women and then raping them while they are unconscious. Despite all efforts, the attacks continue until outside authorities are brought in. They arrest the rapists and take them to the city, but the remaining men decide that the best course of action is to go bail the men out and bring them back to the community. During the men's absence, the women come together to discuss what they can do. This is an account of those meetings.The most terrifying aspect of this novel is that it is based on true events. Toews presents a group ill-prepared for life outside of the Mennonite community. Unlike men, who receive a very basic education, the women are illiterate and don't even know what lies beyond their own lands. They know that they will be expected to forgive the attackers and struggle with whether this is even possible. This is a thoughtful book, carefully representing a faith community that is little known to outsiders. It's also a very quiet, contained novel, despite the lurid subject matter. In the end, the question the women must collectively decide is whether to stay or to leave, and as they grapple with the possible consequences of both actions, a slow consensus builds.
    • 4/5
      I feel like this is such an important little book, of the value of collectivity, of the power in women talking, of the resilience of oppressed groups. Not only is this a story I have never heard before, but it is told through voices that feel familiar. I'm so interested in the fact that a book about women talking is told from a male voice-- and even when this is explained in the text and the logical reasoning is given, it still makes me think.

      There is so much going on here. I really hope people take the chance to read it because it's something special.
    • 4/5
      DAYUM! This book was eye opening and painful to read. The writing was wonderful but the subject matter itself was so hard to stomach, even more so because even though this story is fictionalized, it's based off of true events. Between 2005 and 2009 hundreds of Mennonite women and children were drugged in their sleep and raped. The small Mennonite colonies thought that demons and ghosts were violating them in their sleep, when they reported it to their husbands and fathers no one believed it at first, when women started taking to each other they realized that it wasn't just them, nearly all women (regardless of age) were being attacked in the night and then waking up violated with blood and semen on their thighs and bed. The rapes continued happening until a woman caught two of the attackers sneaking into her house before they could knock her out with the Belladonna spray. The men were then arrested (for their own safety), but the woman found no solace. They were soon told that in order to get to heaven they had to forgive their attackers and allow them back into the community. Women Talking is a fictionalized account of the women meeting and trying to talk out their feelings and their best plan of action for when the men return. They decide that they have three options: stay and do nothing, stay and fight, or leave . Over the course of two days they discuss the pros and cons of each and in the process reveal their deepest, fears, concerns, and questions of faith. It's heartbreaking, empowering, and a must read. Wonderful, albeit upsetting.
    • 4/5
      A group of men in a small isolated Mennonite community drugged and raped women and girls of all ages. The clan's leader told the women that the devil was visiting them in dreams. Now that they have discovered this to be a lie, they must decide whether to forgive the men and stay in their homes, fight, or leave. This book is the minutes of their meetings. Based on a true occurrence.
    • 2/5
      Over a period of years, Mennonite women were repeatedly raped at night. What they believed to be demons, turned out to be a group of men from their own community. Using an animal tranquilizer, the men would spray into the house, and then rape the women. This book takes place after the men are caught and imprisoned. The women are trying to decide whether to stay in the community or leave.Although this was an interesting story, I did not like the writing style. The book just talked in circles. There was very little forward movement. All of the characters blended together, no one seemed to have a unique voice. Overall, a bust.
    • 5/5
      Miriam Toews's novel Women Talking is about just that: over the course of a few days in 2009, eight ultraconservative Mennonite women living in a remote colony in Bolivia talk about what do in the aftermath of a series of brutal rapes that seem to have affected every woman and girl they know. As they see it, they have three options: they can stay and forgive their menfolk (the perpetrators), stay and fight them, or leave the colony to protect themselves and their children. The colony's women are illiterate and only speak an old form of German, so they ask an "effeminate" man of the colony to take meeting minutes for them in English, even though they can't read them (this part of the premise I found a little implausible, but without it there wouldn't be a story. The women talk about the patriarchy that oppresses them. They rightly deduce that the rape is a crime of power, not of sex. The women are concerned with the spiritual implications of the crimes are discussed as well. For a book without much on-stage action, Toews succeeds in building up genuine suspense. Will the women stay or go?Despite its brief length, Women Talking is somewhat slow going. Nonetheless, it rewards the time it takes to read it.
    • 4/5
      A small group of women gather to decide what to do after it is revealed that they, along with most other women and girls in their community, have been repeatedly drugged and raped by the men of their small Mennonite colony. Will they forgive the men, stay and fight, or leave the colony? Their discussions range over what it means to have the freedom to choose, whether one can be a pacifist if one harbors a desire a kill, how best to protect one's children, and many more philosophical topics.It was somewhat jarring that a book that seemed as though it was to be about female empowerment was told from a man's perspective, but it worked. He is privy to the women talking as an amanuensis; none of the women can read or write, but want their deliberations preserved for posterity. He's an outsider in the colony, for reasons that aren't entirely clear, but his outsider status allows the women to trust him for this task, and makes him appropriately sensitive to them, in a way that no other man of their acquaintance could, or would, be.And perhaps this is a realistic notion of what could happen when such an insulated group of people is threatened in this way. But I found it troubling to read about a group of women facing such a threat to themselves and their children and spending two days sitting in a hayloft debating the finer points of free will, rather than making actual plans. The lack of action in the books gives it a claustrophobic feel, which seems appropriate under the circumstances, and that feeling of clautrophobia helps keep the pressure on throughout the narrative, having the effect of sucking the reader through the story, rather in the manner of a pneumatic tube.So what will the women decide to do, and will they be able to follow through on that decision? That is what they are talking about, and the question of whether they will be able to sieze their freedom, no matter what they decide, will leave the reader thinking long after the last page.
    • 5/5
      This book is based on a real-life event, which makes it all the more shocking. Between 2005 and 2009, hundreds of girls and women were raped by eight men from the Mennonite colony they were all part of. The men used an animal anesthetic to knock out their victims and then raped them. At first, the women didn’t know they had been raped but only that they would wake up in the morning feeling exhausted with their bodies bloody and beaten. They were told that ghosts or demons had done it as punishment for their sins or that they were lying or covering up adulterous affairs or that it was all in their imagination. Very young children were included in these rapes, as well as elderly women. Some of the women became pregnant. In 2011, the accused men were convicted. Even after the arrest of these eight men, the attacks still took place.In Ms. Toews’ book, eight of the raped women meet in a hayloft to discuss what they should do to prevent themselves and their daughters from further harm. Should they stay and fight or should they leave? They had a window of opportunity as the men were off trying to raise money for the accused men’s bail. These women were never told how to read or write and knew nothing about reading a map or where they could go. They were told if they could not forgive these men, they could not enter the Kingdom of Heaven. So they had a lot to discuss. If a women whose 3-year-old child had been raped couldn’t forgive in her heart, wasn’t it a worse sin to say she forgave the men even if she didn’t mean it? The women in this community were just commodities to these men and had no say in anything. In reading this book, it was hard to believe that this happened in 2005-2009 and wasn’t something occurring centuries ago.The author does such an excellent job of delving into the hearts and minds of these courageous women. I felt their fear and their heartache and their confusion as to what they should do to make their lives bearable. The suspense builds as the time for the men to return nears. In trying to decide what they should do, they have lengthy discussions about religion and faith. There were times they seemed to forget the urgency of their situation and lectured each other. There’s some humor in this book, despite its dark subject. It’s one of the most unique books I’ve ever read. Don’t expect much of a plot as the book is just what the title says it is – women talking. I think it was quite exceptional and destined to become a feminist classic. Not all readers will like the format of this book but the emotional depth of this story is just astounding.Most highly recommended.This book was given to me by the publisher in return for an honest review.