review on goodreads: If you like weird you’ll like this dystopian land where only 11 percent of the population are men. It’s definitely an interesting take on a world ran entirely by woman and it’s as weird as they come with blood and snake worshipping and man ladies. It’s also definitely what I’d expect to be the outcome of extremely religious fanatic woman if they were to take over the world.

DNF

I started off with no clue what was happening, no clue of its relevance to the plotline. It was the initial description that intrigued me however, I'm about 10% of the way through and have completely lost interest.
How does caring for snakes and lack of money contribute to the world? I have no interest in chores, I want the story.
I'm not sure if it's just not my cup of tea, the blurb grabbed me but there was nothing to make me want to keep going.
Ages 16+ due to mature themes.

I DNF this book. After about a week of trying to force myself to read it, I couldn’t do it. I really wanted to like the storyline but the way it was written was hard to read, I don’t know if it was translation or what, but nothing about the writing flowed. Also the transphobia was hard to get over to enjoy the book as a whole. Then they started mentioning getting sperm from a minor child to mix with menstrual blood and I was out. Great concept.

Unfortunately, I just really could not get into this book. The premise sounded really cool but if a book does not hook me from the beginning I have a hard time enjoying it.

I . . . very much wanted to enjoy this. Unfortunately, it just wasn’t for me. From page one, I wasn’t entirely sure what was going on, but I immediately felt unsettled. While I recognize that this is the intention behind the thematics of the novel itself, an unsettling vibe does little when a reader can’t completely comprehend what’s occurring on the page to make them unsettled. Even after reading several pages multiple times over, I found myself garnering bits and pieces of what was happening, but not enough to fully grasp the allure that Eleven Percent claims to have.

In further research of the book proper, I can see that its original version was in Danish, and I wonder if some things were lost in translation when converting the book to the English language. This is further exemplified by particular word choices that seemed out of place and sentence structures that didn’t quite make sense, no matter how many times you read them. More often than not, these issues arise when things are translated literally, rather than restructured to accommodate its destination language.

Another grievance experienced is that the books overall synopsis does little to convey the truly unsettling horrors that will occur within the book. Despite it’s tagline relating it to something akin to a reverse Handmaid’s Tale, the lack of trigger warnings and the overall blasé way in which concepts and themes are dropped into the synopsis do a disservice to readers who may need to tread carefully when delving into some heavier topic’d books. Particularly so when the subject matter is thought-provoking and enticing enough to attract readers of all kinds. These ideologies of the dangers of testosterone (specifically from male-identifying individuals), the separation between the heretical pagan magics and the witchcraft practiced by Christian Priestesses (another aspect of the story that feels lost in translation, as the dichotomy between the two magic systems doesn’t quite exist in its English form)

There was further an undeniable notion that there were far more words and sentences used then necessary. For instance, within the first few pages alone, things were conveyed with five or six additional sentences, despite the point being made (semi) clear with the first one. This repetitive nature further made the trudge through the book a slog that further contributed to an unenjoyable reading experience.

The novel separated the narrative between four points of view, which sought to break up the repetitive monotony, but the overall experience was very much something akin to asking oneself “What did I just read?” or “What just happened?”.

The overall novel felt unfleshed out, disjointed and cobbled together, to the point where I found myself going back and rereading chapters and pages, as I felt like I had missed something only to discover that it wasn’t me, but the book.

I’m rating this a 2.5, rounded down to 2, purely for its potential, as the thought behind the book is clearly someone impassioned about the speculative fiction of a women-ran world, but it fails to deliver anything other than a confusing and unsettling reading experience.

I don’t feel it’s fair to rate this book 1-star, as there is a greater part of me that does truly feel like it makes far more sense in its source language.

Thank you to Netgalley for the ARC!

This was strange! The writing had a really unique style to it, but I couldn't quite commit to the tone or premise. Some of the wording was a little awkward too. All in all an interesting story

While I was hesitant to share a review, the initial “WTH did I just read” has worn off. The misleading synopsis and lack of trigger warnings didn’t properly prepare me for some of the very disturbing aspects that lie within.

Describing this book as “an inverse to The Handmaid’s Tale” is a stretch as it isn’t even a minor subplot. This book contains many LGBTQ+ themes that parallel what this community continues to experience today along with inverse bigotry and misogyny throughout.

I’m not sure if it’s the writing style, or error in translation, but there are portions of the book that don’t make sense. For example, Christian “priestesses” practice witchcraft but look down on pagans whom practice similar “magic” and are referred to as witches. There were also points in the story where things didn’t progress naturally and I had to go back to see if I missed something. (I didn’t.)

Trigger warnings: Blood, Classism, Forced institutionalization/Slavery, Sexism, Dysphoria, Pregnancy, Transphobia, Animal death, Death during childbirth, Murder, Misogyny, Religious bigotry, Hate crime and Outing

This book is for someone who wants a very literary and almost fantasy dystopian novel about what would happen if women were in charge. I was not able to finish this book because I realized after about 10% that it just was not for me. I thought it was a little bit gross with all of the animal death and cooking with menstrual blood. I am not the person for this book!

When I read something that is going to be taking on very complex ideas, I want to feel like the author is in control of what they're saying. There were elements here that made me deeply uncomfortable because they felt like genuine bad trans rep as opposed to a troubling of the gender binary that I would expect from a book with a dystopian matriarchy. I don't know if it was a translation issue, but I found myself doubting where the author was leading me and, in the end, didn't feel like I came away with anything I had not already considered. I think there's a real place for this type of book, but this one absolutely missed for me.

“An inverse The Handmaid’s Tale that asks: What if women took over the world?”

The conceit on which 'Eleven Percent' is born; apt, then, that, eleven pages in, I was already overcome with the creeping sensation that the prose was using twice as many sentences as needed to convey the spirit.

Let me explain.

Reading a selling sentence like “What if women took over the world” may have inversely set my expectations. The description goes on: “a time not so different from ours except that the men are gone”. Into which, one might conclude, that this is a world as imagined, extended from our own, rather than a ponderous re-write of how the world got started. This is supported in the stories of Medea, the slums witch, Wicca, the conflicted Christian priest, Silence, the tormented hanger-on, and Eva, doctor to the area’s remaining young men. Sentences describe not wanting to go back to a time of men, where straight-edged buildings, random street attacks, and death of the planet occurred. The core of these are delivered to the reader through the four individuals’ narratives, as they try to navigate their own place, and discover that each of their viewpoints may be shaken by their connections to one another.

Or? That is the intention? Because 'Eleven Percent' did not convince me that this was an inevitable way for women to go, after an overturn as hinted.

Right off the jump, our opening narrator is Medea. Already, Medea, a witch, is an outsider, on the fringes of society, practicing an alternative and frowned-upon religion. It’s essentially a non-entrance into the New World that Uthaug tempted us with in the sell. We don’t get to know what schooling is like now, what politics are like now, what general day-to-day life looks like; because Medea wasn’t brought up on any of that. Later, Wicca will provide a slight peek into a little more, but since she lives in an incredibly narrow framework, meeting very few people, and all encapsulated in the heavy influence of her religious upbringing, it still keeps the reader at a strange distance from really branching into what this world can be like now. Silence is another outsider, who even very purposefully avoids people. And the nature of Eva’s birth similarly prevents her from socializing for most of her chapters, which are heavily set in this past. If this is a New World for us to grasp, then why give us four loners who deliberately avoid it?

Not for any lack of Uthaug’s details. As mentioned, there are a lot of rich specifics about what Medea is doing on the daily. However, there are three sentences where the first one already conveyed the point — leading me to feel as though I’m trying to physically push on the text to make it move into a new topic. To bring the reader up to speed, Uthaug uses too many “had said”s — someone had said this or that when they first met, etc — a fine enough device once in a while, but, included with the dragging narration, it begins to feel like another way to avoid having anything happen in the present. The storyteller’s choice to start where they did in time is meant to represent that this was the most definitive set of events in their life; we’re starting exactly at the best place. So, when the prose feels like it wants to do anything but progress, and then we’re thrown into numerous flashbacks, and flashbacks within flashbacks, the actual plot you were looking for becomes the sliding boulder under which the Sisyphusian reader labors.

In this: 'Eleven Percent' is a very lovely character study of three people — yes, just three; Eva’s situation is kind of astonishingly problematic; especially when you remember it’s marketed as “not what she seems” — where their details, decisions, and deliberations on the past can let you luxuriate in that atmosphere and lazily wonder what you may have done if you lived in the same dystopia (and, yes, it is a dystopia these women have created). In a way, Uthaug describes it too well, as it leaves you hungering for the meat of society that the four chosen points-of-view can never reveal. While what is revealed gave me pause. There seem to be not entirely conscious contradictions. I might imagine that some of this haven of womanhood as society has made it is written as satire — as a send-up or the irony that all the ruling women did was put as back centuries. A couple of the paragraphs actually oozed with this suggestion of mocking the very beliefs it was describing. However, the rest of the text definitively did not give off that impression. And, when reading it straight, there were problems. Why was there a comment about how men demonized wise women by calling them witches, and yet Medea, as a witch, is scorned and looked down on without any inference of the hypocrisy? Why, in fact, is there usable magic in the first place? That has nothing to do with if women ruled instead, and greatly muddles how we’re supposed to view the presentation. Free love is essentially preached, and yet the schooling is oppressively sexual; the over-saturation of society’s emphasis on self-pleasure put me on edge, as an asexual person. Never even mind the other preferences and genders. There’s one throwaway line about how it’s kind of actually okay not to be interested in partnering and such, but also there are entire dozens of pages devoted to how your life means less if you haven’t reached climax. Thank you: no.

I do not have the life experience to really dive into it, but the concept of “manladies” made me feel extremely uncomfortable for what felt like honest transphobia. The label, the shaming of the profession (so, also, sex workers), the use of the male pronoun but also a character refers to them as not being “real men”. Extremely uncomfortable. If you have nothing to say about the failure of society to overturn these issues, then don’t include them, as they read very sincere otherwise.

In this way, if it’s supposed to be a wink-nudge-nudge on the two-faced premise, it did not achieve its purpose. Because everyone’s lives and struggles are described as morbidly dramatic and our original viewpoint character, Medea, arguably ends the text in a worse place than she started and with nothing learned for it. The New World encourages nature to take over, damaging the important historical references, as well as wasting materials, but never provides any negative connotations for what they’re doing. Who are the law keepers? Religious leaders? Because, oh boy, that’s a whole handful that isn’t gone into enough then. What are the laws? Are there any laws? Everything is described as “tolerated” but then all of our main characters are persecuted. Is the only political discussion being had really just what sexual position you prefer? Where did all the technology go? Sure, everything man-made is supposed to be disgusting, but what about inventions women created? Breakthroughs in science led by women? Are we supposed to abandon those and decrease standards of living because a man breathed on it once? To these extremes, it is less ‘what if women took over OUR world’ as ‘women can also make things horrible’. This is where my lack of knowledge of The Handmaid’s Tale may have damaged my experience — but the homework should not be on the reader in these instances.

We get a couple delicious glimpses — I really, really enjoyed this idea of “nightwalker”. They are almost like murder tourists: women who take to walking late at night in sketchy areas, because, with men gone, now they can. That this can become a fad is exactly the kind of thing feels like direct commentary on our world, rather than veering awkwardly into magical fantasy. But… so is there… no crime? At all? The only punishable offense we see is, horrifically, being a “manlady” and utilizing “magic”. I’ll say it again: the magic should not be here. It’s a marvelous invention, that belongs in a different book. The slums, and Eva’s backstory, as written, don’t belong in anything this straight-forwardly written.

All to say: I think there is an incredible amount of solid world-building ideas and commentary speckled in little hidey-holes throughout 'Eleven Percent'. Since it did not succeed, for me, as a satire, in tone, a lot of the decisions of the setting never clicked and kept me at a disgruntled distance from the text and people. My main train of thought wasn’t about what will happen to these people, but — “HOW?”

In conclusion, if you enjoy the idea of a slice-of-life in a “could this have happened” world, you’ll get your fill to ruminate on after you’ve put the book down. Uthaug has perfectly descriptive sentences; the book is well-written, clear, and weaves the lives of these people together in a way that unfolds at a nice pace. You’ll certainly find there is a lot to pause and discuss - either with yourself or a fellow reader — so dig in and get at those uncomfortable truths, both meant and unmeant.

However, personally, I lamented the use of too much detail in areas that didn’t need it, and lack of detail in many places I couldn’t conceive not explaining more. There’s very concrete issues of transphobia, sexism (preferences), and body-shaming. I found myself constantly wanting for a momentum that never arrived.

All of the exciting discourse is going to be in your own head after you read, not within the pages here.

This is an honest review in trade for an download of the book provided by NetGalley.

This book was just not for me. The writing was uncomfortably slow, dry, and overall boring. Nothing held my interest and I DNF'd about 30% in. I can see how this is a gender reversal of the Handmaid's Tale but that was all this book had going for it.

This book doesn't take it easy on you. It doesn't ease you in gently into its world. But it is thought-provoking and emotional. You are left feeling uncomfortable, but in a way that feels like you're supposed to feel that way. Not for the faint of heart, but definitely for those with the courage to try it.

Genuinely, I don’t know how to rate this. I read this in between romance books because it’s not the type of book you binge. I initially thought it was going to be like I Who Have Never Known Men and Handmaid’s Tale, but it was a bit different than those.

It wasn’t my favorite book, but it wasn’t bad. You definitely have to be in the mood to read this— it had all the makings of a weird girl litfic in conversation with the harm men cause, religion, and control.

I’m just not sure it was entirely for me. This is the second Scandinavian translated fiction book I’ve read and the first one also had a similar tone, so I’m beginning to think it’s regional.

Thank you to NetGalley for a free ARC!

DNF at 56%. This book is not for me. Aside from the pacing being way too slow, I disliked the writing style and plot. Maybe I would’ve enjoyed it more if I had read handmaiden’s tale, since this is a gender reversal of that. What really contributed to my DNF was how comically over the top everything was. There are no subtle plot devices here, everything is so extreme that it reads more as satire than as fiction: the story focuses on the magical properties of menstrual blood infused cakes, a Christian church that relies on menstrual blood donations and performs services that involve snake-venom fueled rituals, a 200lb python that only eats male animals, and a stolen 10 year old boy who’s feared for his testosterone. There are audiences may find this less bizarre than me, and perhaps they’ll be able to enjoy the story more. I could not.

Furthermore, I found some of the content super inflammatory, like the repeated idea that “men will rape women unless medicated,” (a direct quote) but I suppose I could chalk that up to being used as exposition for the post-patriarchy world in the story.

Well-written and thought-provoking. The novel goes through the POV of four women living in a future where men have all but disappeared from society, and the few men remaining are kept in Centers for the benefit of women's pleasure and procreation. While the concept of the novel is sold as a reverse The Handmaid's Tale, it felt closer to Alderman's The Power, to me. Despite what the blurb makes you think, 'men' are virtually absent from Eleven Percent. The focus is on the four MCs - all women - and the female-only society in which they live.

Each woman's POV was interesting to read, each character flawed, imperfect, and morally gray. I liked that there was no big overarching moral message to this book, which - given the theme - was rather refreshing (and in that sense, deserves its comp with The Handmaid's Tale).

I'd recommend this book to readers looking for a good dystopian novel focusing on nuanced female characters. I would caveat this by saying it's not a novel for the squeamish or the faint of heart. Mind the content warnings before reading.

DNF at 35%. Unfortunately, I did not understand the plot line (it may be due to the writing style, which just may not be for me. And the pacing felt too slow for me.

Eleven Percent by Maren Uthaug is a dystopian novel about a matriarchal/feminist society in the future where ancient priestess cults are revived while men are kept to only eleven percent of the human population.

I found this story quite disturbing and perverse. There were some interesting ideas that were equally unsettling that examined the extremes of feminism. Reproduction and physical intimacy were the obsessive focus in the story's world alongside archaic goddess worship by way of snakes.

It's been a long time since I have read an unnerving story like this one. I found it hocking with its provocative ideas but also extremely original in its world building and also philosophical, with the important questions raised about gender ideologies.

If you like controversial dystopian novels, you should read Eleven Percent.

I wasn't a huge fan of this book. Maybe it was the style it was written in? The plot was a bit dry and not intriguing to me at all. That being said, the twists and how it ended was wrapped up nicely.

This book was definitely interesting, but took me a bit to get into. I liked the different POVs and seeing how their stories intertwined. As for the content of the book itself, it was definitely a different take that was somewhat refreshing (even if a bit disturbing) to read about, especially in this current political climate! It’s nice seeing women truly rule the world for once. Not my favorite, but definitely an interesting read.

A thought-provoking sci-fi masterpiece! This novel flips conventional power dynamics, exploring a world where women dominate society with fascinating and complex implications. The writing is sharp and imaginative, offering a gripping narrative full of intriguing twists. The characters are well-developed, and the societal commentary is both compelling and insightful. A must-read for those who enjoy groundbreaking speculative fiction with deep, engaging themes.