WOMEN TALKING by Miriam Toews

If you like dialog, this is the book for you, as the title is completely appropriate.  The women in question are members of a Mennonite community in Bolivia, and their story stems from a real event.  While they were sleeping, a group of men from the community—husbands, brothers, and sons of the women, in many cases—drugged and raped the women.  I use the term “women” loosely here, as the victims include children as young as three years old.  For a three-year-old to have an STD transmitted during a rape, possibly by a relative, is unfathomable, and, in this case, the only antibiotics available are those used on livestock.  The novel takes place over a couple of days in a hayloft, where the women meet to decide what is the best course of action.  The women believe August Epp, the narrator and local schoolteacher, to be harmless.  Therefore, they have recruited him to take minutes of their meetings, as none of the women can read or write.  They have narrowed their prospects down to three options:  leave, stay and fight, or do nothing.  Another option surfaces later, and that is for the men to leave.  Currently the perpetrators are in jail in town, and the rest of the men in the community are also absent, working on raising bail for the incarcerated men.  We soon learn that these are strong, opinionated women, but their religion has basically rendered them powerless.  This book reminded me of A Thousand Splendid Suns, where again we have a male-dominated, religion-infused society in which women have little hope of escaping their oppression.