The concept of ‘The Men’ interested me and this is my first (and definitely last) foray into the ‘gender apocalypse’ sub genre. It's set in a world just like ours where everyone with a ‘Y’ chromosome disappears. Even if you ignore the obvious transphobic issue this raises (the author recently announced they are non binary and I therefore assumed this would lead to an inclusive and different point of view, I was so wrong) - if half the population disappears overnight how on earth could the country be back on its feet again within 10 days?? I guess I was just hoping for a more intelligent analysis of what this could mean for society. The side characters were unmemorable and uninspiring and added nothing to the plot. The main characters had wild backstories and actually the book would have been much better if it dropped the main premise of the gender apocalypse (which it actually doesn’t deal with at all) and just delved into the lives of the two women. Finally, the ending was so terrible I wanted to throw the book at the wall.

The Men messed with my head in more ways than one. Am I glad I read it? Yes, I tried something different and it made me really think. Would I ever recommend it or read it again? Hell no.

The book I thought I was going to read and the book that I actually read are very VERY different. I was expecting a feminist dystopia somewhere along the lines of Christina Sweeney-Baird's The End of Men, with a world trying to reorganize in the wake of the disappearance of all men. Let's just say that the similarity between the two books ends there. The Men was a long ride through an unsettling world where I kept reading because I wanted to know where this fever dream was going. After finishing, I thought "hmmm, I need to chew on this one for a while" because while I liked some of the scenes, writing, metaphors, and ideas, there were also some BIG problems. It is impossible to address these without spoilers so here is a fair warning.

**SPOILERS AHEAD**

Big Problem #1 is how the author included trans people in this work. Originally I thought that including nonbinary, trans men/women, and people whose genetic makeup does not solely fall into the XY category in a story that focuses on a genetic Rapture was great, especially after reading criticisms about the exclusion of these marginalized groups in previous works of this style. The author even directly addressed this in the text

"We also debated whether it was ever acceptable to call those who were taken “men” (as 99 percent of people did) when that erased all the trans women, intersex people, and nonbinary folks who’d gone."


However, the inclusion is problematic and traumatic. This aspect of who was and who was not included in the story has led to a lot of blowback from readers, with numerous lengthy reviews posted to Goodreads and arguments on Twitter. I tried to read as many of these opinions as possible to gather other POVs. I'm simply going to say that as I was reading the novel, I thought the author was making major strides within the genre by acknowledging and including trans, non-binary, and intersexed people, but I now see how authors can do more.

Giant Problem #2 was the "crazy ex-girlfriend" trope. Poppy has mental health needs that not only aren't being addressed, they're reduced to jokes (Evangeline, her brother, and cousin laughing while mimicking Poppy's screams and "Everyone in lesbian Seattle had a story about calling 911 on Poppy.") The author then sets Poppy up as some sort of visionary for opening the "Door" that started the disappearance and I started questioning the layers to the story. Were we inside Poppy's mind à la The Cell?


There were some other things that I just didn't understand.

The ending. The "it was all a dream" trope is one of the lamest story styles ever but is that what is happening here? If Jane stays in her dream Evangeline won't die? Or by choosing to stay at the campground she is choosing her life as a woman shunned by society but "safe" in the roles of wife and mother, rather than risking it all to live in a utopia with Evangeline?

Was the live stream show of "The Men" supposed to be a metaphor for living in the past by not letting go of those who've disappeared? Who was behind the account? How was it unable to be traced but only women who watched would see their loved ones. And then the watchers disappeared when the men returned. Is that to represent how a woman can disappear into the roles of girlfriend/wife/mother?

Toward the end of the story, readers are told that Blanca is a "mutant" which
Blanca talked the most, about her father and the house they’d had in El Paso with a tall dog gate around the kitchen, where Blanca would lurk and wait for her father to come home with women late at night....One white lady flinched from the sight of Blanca, saying, “What’s that?”...It wasn’t his fault she was born a mutant.

So, Blanca's appearance is so startling that a woman calls her a "what" when the only other information we are given is that Blanca has had to have heart surgery at the beginning of the novel but that would have been after these scenes with her father and the women he brought home. This is just a single example of something being dropped into the story but never expanded on (there were so many that I can't recount them all here.)

I feel like this review is both too long and too short. There are just so many more things to discuss and dissect. Overall, I felt like there were too many loose ends and unexplained storylines. Also, the detailed inclusion of a brutal attack of a trans man, serial rape, allusions to incest, police raids, and gruesome murders just added up to too much trauma porn for my taste.

"I was struck by how profoundly a scene was changed by the removal of the masculine element . . . A world of lambs with no wolves."

Oof. I adored Sandra Newman's previous book, The Heavens, but unfortunately The Men falls flat. Clumsy and ill-thought-out, it's the story of how, one August day, men disappear from the world. And, eh, trans women - yeah, this book is transphobic, both in premise and execution, and also heavily tinged with racism and ableism. In 2022, I have literally no time for this, even if it's accidental, when trans rights are mercilessly under attack.

To give the author some credit, gendercide is never an easy trope to pull off but The Men feels under-researched and confused in the point its trying to make. Are all women "lambs" and all men "wolves"? Dear God?? Big "teenager who has just read about feminism for the first time" vibes to be honest, it's sickeningly naive and frankly insulting.

I read a review that said in 2022, one of the only ways to make the gendercide trope nteresting is for the story to take place entirely from a trans persons POV - obviously I don't think Newman is the author to do this, but nevertheless, it's a very good point. Until then, I'll be avoiding this trope like the plague. A major disappointment.

It's not often that a book covers a female rapist/child molester. There's a lot of interesting things inserted into this book, but it feels like it tried to do too much and it was not interested in the premise it presented.

It says it's a book about all the men disappearing and a Utopian society rebuilt by women, it's really just about the relationships of a couple characters... and the majority of the book has nothing to do with the mystery of the missing men or living through their disappearance and rebuilding society. Not sure what the author was trying to do, but it was too much and the story didn't make sense?

I was excited about the premise of this book.. it seemed really interesting! To echo some of the other reviewers.. I had a hard time reading and finishing this book. It felt poorly researched and sort of out of touch with LGBTQ issues and racism. Just not my cup of tea!

I’m sorry I have to give an honest review. I’m currently working in the medical field and have gone through university studying genetics and how it affects development and growth. Seeing the blatant disregard for the science of genetics got on my nerves the whole time I was reading this book. I really had to force myself to finish it.

There was a bit of a kerfuffle over this book, and I decided to request an ARC to see if it was really as bad as people were saying. I didn’t find anything to recommend it, and that author’s (or maybe it was her friend’s?) claim to have considered trans people respectfully was either a joke or we have very different ideas of what constitutes respect.

Thank you to NetGalley for an ARC of The Men.

I love post-apocalyptic books, usually when zombies and monsters are running around, and though the premise is nothing new (it seems there are a glut of books featuring a planet with no men on it lately), I'm always interested to see if an author has a fresh and original take on the 'no men in the world' plot device.

One evening, all the men in the world disappear and the world immediately changes (obviously). Three women become the focus of the narrative, the points of view shifting constantly so we can glean a bit of what their life is like after the Disappearance.

This is a difficult book to review because I really wanted to like it, and I didn't.

The writing was good, but it rambled; there was no cohesiveness to it. The Disappearance is superfluous to what the author really wants to write about; the trauma and drama Jane and Evangelyne endured when the world was normal.

There's a bizarre video circulating on social media about what happens to the men and its origins are speculated; the images are violent, disturbing, and features men Jane and others recognize; their sons and husbands, brothers and colleagues.

As I was reading, I couldn't help feeling the author had a political agenda of her own that she was trying to convey her political beliefs through The Men.

Then that ending...reminds me of the plot in a spy movie when the spy has no memory of what he or she did before and after going through a series of grueling obstacles and battling other spies, realizes she/he didn't remember they had agreed to extracting their memories in the first place.

The ending was a serious letdown.

Did the author want it to be some sort of Black Mirror-esque ending?

Well, it doesn't work.

I don't mind ambiguous endings but after slogging through the narrative, I wanted a worthy, interesting resolution for the time I spent reading this.

Readers looking for a post-apocalyptic novel similar to Y: The Last Man will be very disappointed like I am.

so many things about this book are bad - the racism, the plot, the prose, the ableism, the ~twist~, the ending (it’s a dream, really? what is this, tumblr 2010?), the transmisogynistic premise, the racism. honestly this book felt like nothing happened and a white woman is just malcontent about her life. because in fact, nothing happened, and a white woman is just upset about her life choices.

here’s the main events of the book: jane pearson is camping with her husband and young son. while they go to bed in the tent she falls asleep outside, in a hammock. she wakes up and they’re gone. she stays on the mountain 10 days trying to find them. she comes down and realizes all the men (technically everyone with xy chromosomes) has disappeared. she eventually seeks out her old good friend/almost lover, evangelyne moreau, a black political revolutionary and the only remotely interesting character. the book is interspersed with details about a mysterious site that has videos of the disappeared people in weird, trippy settings. eventually evangelyne’s past with a bipolar girl comes out and it’s somehow all her fault, and she asks jane to choose her over her husband & son, and if she doesn’t choose evangelyne everything will go back to the moment the men disappeared - including evangelyne with a police mob surveilling her house.

jane pearson is insufferable the entire story. the men is just a book about her feeling bad about her cushy life that she is unwilling to leave, even though she is bored and unhappy. and the story really didn’t need to be 200 pages of annoying racist comments to be told. far too frequently a white character would be like "I had this racist impulse/thought and was ashamed" and it never added anything to the story but it kept happening, just a book of white guilt. jane’s ultimate choice at the end directly causes evangelyne to be murdered by the police in her own home.

jane talks about the advantages of men disappearing as if women have no agency, as if all women go around appeasing the men in their lives and putting all women’s behaviors at the behest of men. the prose also just says some inane stuff sometimes, like this quote:

"it has always astonished me how women talk. men talk, but women talk as if engaged in research, talk in no direction, pondering, investigating, acting out scenes, asking open-ended questions, spinning a life like a spiderweb and dancing upon that woven life"

like first of all this is just a wild romanticization of how women talk, and, i’ve been a woman in my time, i’ve navigated social spaces both as a woman and as a man (and as a gnc woman, a trans man, as genderqueer, a dyke, a fag - plenty of genders i’ve acted out!) and this is an absolutely buckwild thing to write. the painting of men as a monolith of terribleness, of maladjustment and violent and stupid and oh women are never these things - is extremely gender essentialist and also the most stupid, basic, boring analysis of gender.

"on the subway, two people asked if ruth wanted help, and when she got down from the train platform, for the first time ever it didn’t smell of urine. that undid her, and she was sobbing on the train, so furious at the men. of course you couldn’t know their disappearance was punishment, but who didn’t think it was punishment? after all the wars, the pollution, the rapes? they even had to piss on the train platforms! they had to keep misbehaving until they got erased."

we all know women of course wouldn’t cause war, pollution, or rape, or piss outside of toilets (also, you think the piss on train platforms is because dudes wanted to piss there or do you think maybe the lack of public bathrooms might be related). narrowing every social issue down to “oh it’s because of men” is such a nearsighted analysis - as if all the bullshit we live with can be boiled down to manhood. wealth, race, religion, greed, selfishness, individualism - so many things contribute to the evils of the world, and those wouldn’t disappear if men weren’t around. powerful women would be there ready to take up the gauntlet.

"i was also the nice white girlfriend who could give white donors a feeling of safety, a girl with a radiant public goodness like a stained-glass window, like eva perón. in this connection, my sex offender status only seemed to add a little spice, as perhaps fascism had for eva."

this is an insane sentence i don’t need to say anything more on it.

the way that the book throws in some “oh i saw trans women in the weird videos of the men also” and “there was a trans man but he got sexually assaulted in the street” is absurd considering that the book is still entitled *the men* and the mention of transness and gender and sex variance aren’t investigated in the context of the story at all. honestly i’d rather the editor who advised newman to write those mentions in didn’t do so because somehow it makes the “everyone with xy chromosomes disappears” premise worse. i’m more offended by the shitty attempt of inclusion than i would be by the run of the mill sex-based essentialism that i experience every day.

my rating: 1/5 stars

Thank you to NetGalley for providing an eARC in exchange for an honest review.

I... Did not like this. I finished it, but it was almost physically painful. I love post-apocalyptic stuff, and someone said it was similar to "Station Eleven." It is decidedly NOT. It's transphobic and harmful, and it also just isn't executed well. The gendercide trope is one that's very hard to do successfully, and "The Men" didn't even get close to remotely successful. It put me off the author entirely.

I can’t give a fair review because I really could not follow what was going on, and what I did follow was either sexually graphic, homophobic or horribly violent. This was not a book for me. I requested this title from Netgalley because I have read another dystopian book in which women become dominant through a newly acquired power and found it provocative and entertaining. This book may have been provocative but it certainly wasn’t entertaining, and I can’t recommend it.

Received an advance copy of this book as there's nothing that makes we want to read a book more than a little controversy

I understand where the transphobic allegations come from — specifically, saying all people with Y chromosomes have disappeared and then calling the book The Men does ignore trans, nonbinary, and intersex people. On a related note, mentioning here that The Men refers to a streaming tv show that depicts a sorta-demon world that the disappeared seem to have gone to, and there is a point in the book where the narrator mentions that they know calling the show The Men isn't perfect but that it seemed to have stuck.
However, the book does address trans and nonbinary people and acknowledges they exist. Whether or not this is done well, other reviewers have addressed — though I do agree that at points it feels like an afterthought.

On the other hand, I am a big fan of dystopian stories (especially literary ones) and this one was intriguing — what are the implications if half the population disappeared? Airplanes drop out of the sky, trash collection ceases, talking heads on tv are suddenly gone. And then people get on with their lives, because they have to! This book is not for someone who wants all the details and logistics of how people overcome and carry on (which is fine, not every book needs to do that), but it certainly mentions all the difficulties of an apocalypse event in a way that scratched that itch for me.

This book really excels in an exploration of these women's ordinary lives and their traumas from men — and though the book at times alleges that men are evil and sinful and that's why they disappeared, it also depicts a black woman's traumas from white women.

Jane's story of being groomed by her ballerina teacher to have sex with teen boys (her own age or a little younger) in front of him was horrifying and memorable, along with her subsequent prosecution for statutory rape and effect it had as she tried to move on with her life.

And Evangelyne's stories of police brutality are unforgettable.

I found the streaming show depicting the disappeared as mindless in a demon-like world to be a bit too much and too out there for me, especially when they start eating children and I wondered why we even needed this as part of the plot and it felt like the book would be better without it. BUT then at the end it all came together in a surprisingly satisfying way.

In addition to the repeated ableist language ("paralyzed" by fear? really?) and the transphobia (the scene of the trans man being sexually assaulted by a group of cis women while the narrator watched and did nothing will stay with me in a terrible way), the prose here is dull. it's clearly edited and considered, but it's exactly the sort of literary prose where I feel vaguely intrigued in the moment and then forget it in a moment. Also, the cover of the book made me think this was a genre novel like The XX Men.

The Men is a sloppily constructed book built on a deeply flawed, transphobic premise. Its multiple point of view perspective is a strange exploration of what a world could look like if all people with a Y chromosome suddenly disappeared.

I read this for the sole purpose of finding out what the controversy was. This book was painful to get through. I was trudging through it rather than enjoying it. There were storylines I was interested in that got dropped or lost in the sauce. In the end I didn't care about any of the characters or even finishing the book even though the idea behind the book is interesting.

I received an eArc of this book in exchange for an honest review, so yes I did read this book and you better believe these are my honest opinions.

I first heard about the book from the author's twitter getting publicly dragged because the premise is transphobic. Now I am one of the like three people who watched and loved the tv series of Y the Last Man, I don't think this premise has to necessarily be transphobic (but often is, as is the case with the comic, Y the Last Man). The trans representation in this book is very minimal We get a couple of references to the transwomen being gone and by a couple I literally mean twice. One character references how the trans girls she was friends with as a teen are gone and trans women are seen in the eerie films of The Men. Also some leftists talk about how saying the men disappeared isn't quite right because trans women were poofed as well and that trans men won't recreate the same power dynamics in relationships as cis men (I think this take about trans men is supposed to sound stupid as we see a protagonist emotionally abused by her lesbian partner a couple of pages later). How are trans men represented? We get to see an unnamed trans man brutally beaten up and sexually assaulted in the wake of the disappearance. As a cis person I do not feel qualified to pass judgement on this book as transphobic or not that said this book seemingly has nothing meaningful to say about trans identity.

I honestly question if this book has anything meaningful to say at all which is a weird takeaway from such an inherently political premise. The Men feels like it desperately wants to be Station Eleven but all of the characters save Jane and Evangeline are extremely flat. We learn about their relationships with men and that's about it, they don't even have any effect on the plot despite being set up as secondary protagonists. Instead we are treated to a long trauma congoline in the form the backstories of Jane and Evangeline. I say this as someone who loves stories about trauma (give me some good hurt comfort any day), these character's backstories are just upsetting. They are graphic and feature sexual assault and police violence. And there is no pay off to seeing this trauma porn, it's just trauma porn.

I cannot discuss pay off without discussing this book's ending so spoilers ahead. This book ends with the twist that it was just a dream (maybe?) which I'm sorry that's a joke ending. There's no narrative arc, no character growth, hell there isn't even any sociological story telling.

Some books are bad in a fun way, this book is bad in a boring way.

I wasn't sure what to expect from this book but i just couldn't get into it. I hate to not finish a book but sadly i couldnt finish this one.

Many people will read the synopsis and come to this book expecting something akin to <i>Y: The Last Man</i> or Lauren Beukes's <i>Afterland</i>; Sandra Newman is no stranger to writing dystopic/post-apocalyptic fiction after <i>The Country of Ice Cream Star</i>, which would reinforce that expectation. I came to it regretting not having read <i>Y</i>, expecting that a comparison of how each dealt with the nuts-and-bolts of how a post-male society dealt with the disruption and reconstruction of previously male-dominated sectors, etc., would be de rigueur and valuable commentary. But this is emphatically NOT that kind of book; it is altogether more optimistic (even utopian) and above all <i>stranger</i> than that (perhaps no surprise for readers of Newman's previous book <i>The Heavens</i>). Some people will be disappointed by that, or by the frankly gauzy treatment of the "why" behind the phenomenon, or by the ambiguity of the ending, but I thought it was a unique and engrossing read.

The cover design needs work, though, as of right now -- it makes you think the title is "The XX-Men" and expect something decidedly more comic-booky.

The Men by Sandra Newman was a quick read.
I enjoyed the premise of the story and the characters were engaging.
This was a good, interesting story to be honest at first I didn't know what this was going to be about!
But as I kept reading I slowly but surely got sucked in!
My only problem with this book would be the ending!
I wished it didn't end the way it did. But that's a personal reason!

Thank You Publisher and Author for this eARC!

The idea behind this novel isn’t exactly novel – the world has been de-manned before fictionally. Y The Last Man comes to mind immediately, for one thing. So the novelty here is in the spin. Wherein YTLM did the arguably misogynistic thing of telling the story of a man-free world from the perspective of the last man alive, The Men is a women’s story, a story of women surviving in a suddenly and strikingly changed world.
Then again, a. I never found YTLM misogynistic, I found it poignant and fascinating and very clever and b. I like a large sprawling take on dystopia that informs of all the ways society changes and this novel tells a much more contained story.
The Men is essentially several separate narrative strands of different women that eventually weaves itself into one, and that one is mainly a tale of Jane Pearson, a wife and a mother, who finds herself alone and adrift and that drift takes her right back to her ex, once an infamous political voice and now a potent political power.
In the past, Jane and her ex have both been victims of the system. Jane is now forever associated with a sex abuse scandal and her ex is officially a cop killer. That alone allows the novel to pontificate the societal evils elaborately and thoroughly, covering the justice system, racism, gender, sexuality, the court of public opinion, etc.
Their relationship is fraught and complicated and only gets more so as the time progresses.
And all the while, there’s a strange footage that everyone’s watching that show the disappeared men going on about their business…adding a strangely surreal element to the already somewhat surreal proceedings.
All in all, it’s a very strange book. The narrative is dense and light on dialogue, but it has a very nice flow to it. There’s a hypnotic quality there even, it’s immensely readable in all its strangeness. And it’s positively laden with morals and messages that are strategically targeted to the modern woke audiences. It’s an interesting and an intriguing novel, but it leaves something to be desired. In no small way, due to that cheat of an ending. Not sure what to make of that twist, can’t discuss it – it would give too much away, but it kind of cheapens the novel and distracts and detracts from its overall poignancy. Or at least, it did for me.
Either way, interesting enough of a read to be worth your time, especially for the gender-based dystopian fans out there. Thanks Netgalley.