Four women discover the cracks in their all-female utopia in Eleven Percent, the sharply written debut from Maren Uthaug, translated from the Danish by Caroline Waight.
Everyone in the new society agrees that men, with their high levels of testosterone, cannot be allowed to roam free. The minimum number of men necessary for breeding are kept in "spas" for procreation and recreation. Yet all is not perfect. Medea and Silence fight for the survival of their pagan convent, where Medea works magic, raises snakes, and sometimes protests for better treatment of the men in the spas. Wicca, heir of an important family of priests in the remade matriarchal Christian church, did well in her "body" classes in school but now struggles with her ritualistic duties and is still haunted by a lover who left her years before. And Eva, who cares for the young males in a Center, is hiding a childhood secret that could destroy her position.
Uthaug's vision of a matriarchal society falling into the same traps as patriarchal ones is strikingly realized. Although conception is voluntary, maintaining the ideal ratio of males to females leads to its own impingements on reproductive freedom. As brutally as Uthaug depicts the struggles of the haves and have nots in her new world, she also includes moments of sly humor. The sexual slang in the more advanced levels of the body classes makes for some particularly witty inversions of the world as we know it. Fans of social science fiction will be well pleased. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library