Walking wide-legged like awkward herons, wetting their hems, they peer into the water for fish and crabs, until the younger one turns back and yells, We’re going to swim, Mother!īut you can’t swim! Vanessa cries frantically.

Don’t go too far! calls Vanessa, but they pretend not to hear. Rising and conferring with their heads close together, they hike up their dresses to wade into the sea. The girls clasp each other’s forearms and spin in a circle, shrieking with laughter, until they collapse on the sand. One daughter stops to turn and wave wildly, and Vanessa, her heart aching with love, waves back. A calescent sun shatters on the surface of the water, luminous shards slipping about on the tiny waves like a broken, sparkling film. Their dresses flutter chalk-white, like apple flesh or a sun-bleached stone. Her two limber, graceful daughters are dancing and leaping on the shore as she watches from the grass where the sand ends. Vanessa dreams she is a grown woman, heavy with flesh and care. Gather the Daughters is a smoldering debut dark and energetic, compulsively readable, Melamed’s novel announces her as an unforgettable new voice in fiction. 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. At seventeen years old, Janey is so unwilling to become a woman, she is slowly starving herself to death. 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.īorn leader Janey Solomon steps up to seek the truth. 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. But in the summer, the younger children reign supreme. They have children, who have children, and when they are no longer useful, they take their final draught and die. At the first sign of puberty, they face their Summer of Fruition, a ritualistic season that drags them from adolescence to matrimony. The daughters of these men are wives-in-training. 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.

They built a radical society of ancestor worship, controlled breeding, and the strict rationing of knowledge and history. Years ago, just before the country was incinerated to wasteland, ten men and their families colonized an island off the coast. Never Let Me Go meets The Giver in this haunting debut about a cult on an isolated island, where nothing is as it seems.

Jennie melamed