Recent Read:

Califia's Daughters, by Leigh Richards
I admit it. I'm a sucker for postapocalyptic novels. Earth Abides; Alas Babylon; On the Beach; great stories all. Perhaps it's because I enjoy seeing how the characters overcome the difficulties of surviving in a world turned hostile, or how they try to preserve some semblance of civilization in the fact of savagery. Perhaps it's because I feel a kind of sentimental self-pity at seeing the great work of human society come to nothing. Or perhaps it's because I have some kind of mean-spirited resentment of most of the human race and would just as soon most of them went away and left the earth in the possession of a few surviving decent and intelligent people.

In Califia's Daughters, the wreck of the world has occurred many years ago, and the characters in the story are several generations into the process of survival and recovery. Nearly all of them are female, like the mythical Amazonian queen to which the title refers. One of the plagues that wrecked the world of "Before" was a virus which selectively wiped out men, leaving a ratio of ten or more women for every surviving man. Now in some puerile imaginations, this might create a world in which every man had a harem. Richards is more pragmatic than that. In her story, the women have taken over the functions of life and society, and the surviving men are relegated to the role of property to be carefully managed and hoarded. If they're lucky, they're cherished and guarded like prized breeding stock. If not, they're imprisoned and treated as slaves.

Both the author and her characters do good jobs of world-building. The world resented by the author is believable, and devoid of silly utopian theories about women being somehow morally superior to their male counterparts. The women in Califia's Daughters cover the full spectrum of human character from generous to ferociously greedy, from kindhearted to sadistic.

Recommended, especially for anyone who enjoyed any of the books I mentioned in the first paragraph.