Gather the Daughters: A Novel

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Or some thing,” replies Natalie. The glow grows brighter. There are more girls gathered around the doorway now. There is Vanessa, a daughter of a Wanderer who both loves and fears her father for reasons that slowly become horrifyingly apparent to the reader. Never Let Me Go meets The Giver in this haunting debut about a cult on an isolated island, where nothing is as it seems. Years ago, just before the country was incinerated to wasteland, ten men and their families colonized an island off the coast. They built a radical society of ancestor worship, controlled breeding, and the strict rationing of knowledge and history. Only the Wanderers–chosen male descendants of the original ten–are allowed to cross to the wastelands, where they scavenge for detritus among the still-smoldering fires. The daughters of these men are wives-in-training. At the first sign of puberty, they face their Summer of Fruition, a ritualistic season that drags them from adolescence to matrimony. They have children, who have children, and when they are no longer useful, they take their final draught and die. But in the summer, the younger children reign supreme. With the adults indoors and the pubescent in Fruition, the children live wildly–they fight over food and shelter, free of their fathers’ hands and their mothers’ despair. And it is at the end of one summer that little Caitlin Jacob sees something so horrifying, so contradictory to the laws of the island, that she must share it with the others. Born leader Janey Solomon steps up to seek the truth. At seventeen years old, Janey is so unwilling to become a woman, she is slowly starving herself to death. Trying urgently now to unravel the mysteries of the island and what lies beyond, before her own demise, she attempts to lead an uprising of the girls that may be their undoing. Gather The Daughters is a smoldering debut; dark and energetic, compulsively readable, Melamed’s novel announces her as an unforgettable new voice in fiction. Gather the Daughters by Jennie Melamed – eBook Details

Dabney: Did you think specifically about the religious symbolism of Janey and Mary? Janey as the Christ-like sacrifice and Mary as, well, Mary? Here are the main inconstancies that bother me. First, we are never given any information regarding the wasteland to really understand how this society emerged. We get hints and clues, but even more disturbingly, it seems that most of the facts regardi There’s silence as everyone ponders this uncharted world. The lit- tlest girls, already bored, have started a game to see who can jump the farthest. Cheers and whoops carry from one corner of the room, pro- viding a jarring score to Janey’s words.

Gather the Daughters

The silence this time is full of doubt. “But,” says Fiona, “what about the ancestors?” “What about them?” demands Janey. “Well,” says Fiona, as if explaining something to a very small child,

KD: From the moment I discovered Gather the Daughters was being marketed as a 'book cult' I knew I wanted to read it. Did you have any idea that this particular non mainstream genre with a cult world would be so easily accepted by readers?Because of the small number of people on the island, everyone has an assigned job- that they keep for life. Reproduction, meetings and courtships are also controlled by tradition. Janey unfolds her spindly body and walks up to the altar, almost as tall as the pastor but slender as a blade of grass. When she speaks from behind the podium, her faint voice is suddenly strong and echo- ing. With a start, Caitlin wonders if Pastor Saul’s sermons are really deep and thundering, his voice driven by otherworldly power, or if it’s simply a result of the way the church is structured. Janey coughs. “I . . . thank you for coming here. I just wanted to — I was talking with someone before she died. And she was talking about leaving the is- land. Maybe going to the wastelands, but I thought, maybe there’s another island. Another island to go to.”

As the nation is suffering from dementia, Wynter finds herself struggling to belong in this apocalyptic world. One night, her sister shows up at her home unexpectedly with some mysterious medical samples. As things start to unfold, she starts to realize that these samples are critical for curing this disastrous plague. She knows she needs to deliver them to a lab in Colorado and confides in ex-military member Chase Miller. Although she feels like she can trust him, little does she know he has his own agenda. With the world on the brink of disaster, Wynter can’t help but worry if she made the right decision. The Princess Trials by Cordelia K. Castel That one sentence summarizes the horror of living as a girl in this disturbed society. Even calling this society disturbed doesn’t feel like enough. It is horrific and beyond understanding. I’m not going into that dark church,” says Letty firmly. “Me either,” says Rosie. “Something might be in there.” “What if there’s something waiting to eat us?” pipes up JoanneBut before that time comes, a ritual offers children an exhilarating reprieve. Every summer they are turned out onto their doorsteps, to roam the island, sleep on the beach and build camps in trees. To be free. SA: I read where you first got the idea based off an anthropological paper on corporal discipline in different societies and how in some places behaviors that we would consider abuse are viewed as perfectly normal. How long did it take you to develop the plot and write the book once you had your inspiration? Caitlin thinks of another island, perhaps with a similar church, perhaps with a red-haired girl admonishing the others at midnight.

Gather the Daughters is about a small community that lives with no electricity or modern conveniences on an island. They have a church made of stone that sinks into the ground and a holy book written by "the ancestors." These ancestors are saint-like founders who, according to tradition, fled the wider world to preserve the human race during an apocalypse.The hierarchy within the cult is familiar: Men rule, women are there for the men. Sadly, this also includes the daughters. This book had it's own language as well which I found very creative. For example: the summer of freedom(such joy!), the summer of fruition(seriously messed up), the shalt nots, the scourge, the Wanderers, the final draft, the defectives, and the Wastelands. All these words helped to create a world that I couldn't escape from. When the ancestors came to the island, they built a massive stone church before they even built their own houses. What they didn’t know was that such a heavy building would sink down into the mud during the summer rains. Everyone must marry, girls after the “summer of fruition” following their first periods, boys at the end of adolescence. Partly as a means of population control, after the births of two healthy children fathers are expected to have sex with their pre-pubescent daughters, although forbidden to do so with girls of reproductive age. “Defective” babies, whose numbers are increasing because of the small gene pool, are killed at birth. Do we have to go?” says Vanessa. She remembers Janet’s birthing of her last defective, which was horrifying and repulsive.