Reviews with content warning for Police brutality - I Who Have Never Known Men

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I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman

8 reviews

rainbopagn's review against another edition

dark emotional mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

I spend through this in about a day. Harpman’s prose totally drowns you in the story, a bit rambling a times and harshly blunt at others. You leave the book thinking about what makes you human. My one complaint is that we never learn our narrators name. I would have liked to see the women help name her given she was their child, whether they liked it or not.

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picaresquedreamer's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional funny hopeful inspiring mysterious reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

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taylormoore's review

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challenging emotional mysterious reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.25

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josiemeyer's review

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adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

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refrejarator's review

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dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

I feel so hopeless after reading this. Madly depressing and terribly mysterious.

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rionstorm's review

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dark mysterious reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.75

A really interesting (and bleak) exploration of how we make sense and meaning of ourselves and our role as a Person, and how much of that is situational. The narrator's musings on how time only has meaning and we only really exist when it's in relation to other people really struck a chord with me.

If you are looking for fast paced or hopeful dystopian fiction you won't like this.

Ending spoilers

Have seen the story described as "a puzzle that refuses to be solved", and I feel that's accurate - but as frustrating as that is, I can respect the authors decision not to explain anything. It sort of places you alongside the narrator and gives you the option to either choose to continue going knowing that there probably won't be a resolution, or give up.

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overmonroeville's review

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adventurous dark emotional inspiring reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

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magicshop's review against another edition

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dark mysterious reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

And gradually, I began to feel sorry for those women determined to carry on living, pretending they were active and making decisions in the prison where they were locked up for ever, from which death was the only release – but would they remove the bodies?

i liked his book quite a bit. i thought the writing style was quite unique in the sense that it's told from a first person perspective. you rarely find books like that that are written as well as this one.

from the start, you spend time in this first person pov. you stay there the whole way through, and you slowly find out what's actually going on with the narrator. the tone of the text is that of a letter, or a message of some sort. she’s writing to a mystery recipient, and in my case i often wondered if she even knew who this recipient would be.

spoilers and full review below.

you slowly find out more about this narrator as the story goes on. what you do know right away is that she lives in a bunker with about 20 (or 40, i can’t recall) other women and that they are trapped in that bunker, which is constantly watched by several guards, all day and all night. they have been living in that nightmarish prison for most of the narrator’s young life.

one day they escape – not of their own choice, though they had been planning an escape attempt – but rather due to unforeseen and very mysterious circumstances.

i spent most of this novel wondering what was going on and hoping so much for every question to be answered. but the thing that i eventually realized is that the point of this particular story is not actually the story itself; it’s the characters. it's a character-driven story written like a sci fi mystery. i thought that was particularly well done because the author constantly tells you things about the plot that you get more and more curious about – you want to unveil its secrets and get all the answers, you want to figure out what's going on. but all the time, she's also telling you: hey, by the way, it's not about that. it's all about these women. it's about this particular woman, and how she lives her life and what she finds, and how she feels and what she thinks.

at some point in this story, i think you’re supposed to realize that you're never actually going to find out what’s going on. just like the narrator, you’re stuck in time. you are just one person and the child is just one woman, with her limited lifespan and limited resources and limited strength to carry on.

the child never found out why she had to lose every single person she ever knew and loved. she never found out why everything had to happen the way it did. it's really a metaphor for life itself. there's no grand narrative involved, there's no plan that we know of for how things happen, and why things happen. so i think in a sense by interweaving story and characters the way harpman did, sort of how things happen in real life, she's asking us to come to terms with everything being a human entails, the same way our main character had to do at the end of her life.

despite lacking so many elemental human experiences and not even having been given a name (who needs a name when you’re never going to meet anyone to introduce yourself to?), the child remains relatable and interesting to the reader (at least to me, of course). she seems almost naive at times, but other times she can sound extremely knowledgeable and wise. she was notably intelligent yet her tone often read as that of a child or teenager. i think this juxtaposition was very realistic for someone who lived a life like hers, who never had to grow up in some ways and was forced to grow up so fast in others.

i also find it very poignant that the child starts off living in a bunker and finds her demise inside another. the contrast and the similarities between her first bunker experience, where she had no privacy, no comforts, and only her own mind to keep herself entertained and sane – versus her experience in the bunker where she dies, where there's a lot of tangible entertainment, comfort in solitude, food in abundance, etc. she lives a long time in relative comfort then, but she’s just as restless and miserable as she'd always been – because she never was able to find what she was looking for even after all the time she spent searching.

the child was free to leave the last bunker at any time; she simply chose to stay there. there was nothing else for her to do in this life, and she knew that. she was buried even before death, just as she would’ve been if she’d been forced to stay in the first bunker, and neither did she have more answers than she did back then. that’s the tragedy of her life.

one last thing i want to say is how much i appreciate the way this book is so quietly and subtly queer. there are women in the group who are together and even live together in the houses that they build at one point in the story. at another point, before the houses, and while she was still young, the main character notices these pairs (she had only ever heard of straight relationships and had only had heterosexual urges at this stage) so she's like, what is this? and althea, one of her best friends and mentors, is like, oh, this is normal. this is just the way they take care of each other. and the child instantly accepts and sees this as normal as well, once she learns what it is. and i think that for a book published in 1995, that's kind of amazing and insanely valuable. it's not the main focus of the book by any means, but it is there and it is seen as very normal and very healthy, especially in a situation where most things these women go through are so depressing and gruesome – nevertheless they have each other, and it’s a much needed source of comfort and hope for some of them.

finally, i recommend this book to anyone, but please make sure you’re in a favorable state of mind to read about very bleak and possibly depressing topics before you tackle it. but really, anyone would benefit from reading this story. it's a very important reflection on the human race and how it survives despite all odds.

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