It’s hard not to compare Vox to The Handmaid’s Tale, and frankly, it feels a little derivative. Set in the “now” but with a slight twist, the religious right has risen up after that hopey-changey African American president and hijacked, and silenced, half the country. Women now have to wear a bracelet on their wrists that limit them to 100 words a day or they get an electric shock, and the government has plans to silence them permanently. They’ve conscripted Dr. Jean McClellen to help them in their efforts, and she’s received a temporary reprieve from her bracelet, only to have her husband say that he liked her better when she was silent. Her teenaged son is swallowing the propaganda hook line and sinker, and her five-year-old daughter gets an award for not saying an entire word all day at school. The premise is great… but then the rest of the plot happens. There are some unnecessary coincidences (her mother has a stroke in the exact part of her brain that Jean is an expert on, really?) and the events at the end are murky and hard to understand. I feel like this book could have been so much more, and that it needed a bit more time in development to flesh out the details better. Sorry, I’m a details gal!
