It's pretty amazing what this managed to convey in less than 200 pages. The translation is really great, there were only a few sentences I genuinely stumbled over throughout. 

The beginning of this story was a little cathartic for me as someone who is aro/ace. Even though I've never personally been frustrated to understand the specifics around sex, love, and intimacy, and have always had ways to gain that information if I wanted to find it, seeing the child narrator being left out of these conversations with the other women all for the excuse of she could never use the knowledge, seemed reflective of an ace or otherwise queer experience. 

I really loved how this examines the things that people take for granted. Since the narrator never goes through full puberty and thus never starts having periods, and also that the guards punished the women from touching each other, I assumed that a mixture of shame and fear of punishment kept the women from masturbating while in the cell. So when the women escape the cabin and the narrator observes them pairing off, of course she doesn't understand that they could be having sex with each other. The women have only ever spoken of having husbands and making love in the abstract. If women could get sexual pleasure by themselves or with each other, what's the point of men? Lol 😆 And this extends to other general things around privacy, e.g. going to the bathroom, since the narrator doesn’t remember having any outside of her own thoughts, she doesn’t feel things like shame the same way the other women that remember the old world do.

The mystery of how and why the 40 women were imprisoned, and who the guards were is an interesting thing to think about but I’m glad the focus wasn’t on answering those questions. The focus was on the women and the relationships they build and the solidarity they build with each other.

I will be rereading this for years to come!