When I first stumbled upon the novel Yours for the Taking by Gabrielle Korn, I was intrigued by the premise. Given how rampant and inescapable toxic masculinity is in society, it’s not unusual to hear people wish for a world without men. So, what if that happened? What if someone created a society free from men and with women in charge? Wouldn’t it make society better? While I was excited to see this thought experiment played out and problematized, I was ultimately left disappointed in the overall results.
The year is 2050 and the Earth is becoming uninhabitable due to climate change. Luckily, The Inside Project has a solution: fully enclosed and self-sustaining cities in which people can live free from the ravages of the outside environment. One such Inside is the one in New York City, fully funded and managed by the feminist billionaire Jacqueline Millender. Jacqueline has secret plans for her Inside though: only fifty-thousand specifically chosen women will be allowed to enter. Her intention is to build a world and society free of men and the toxic masculinity she believes is endemic to them. While she receives some pushback from her assistant Shelby and the head of Inside’s medical team Olympia, the plan goes forward. One such woman allowed inside is Ava. While she is initially upset that her girlfriend didn’t get in, she finds a sense of belonging in this new society. As more and more of Jacqueline’s plans for her new society are revealed, however, these three women begin to see the cracks in the system and have to decide how to react.
As I previously said, Yours for the Taking has a very interesting premise. I liked the concept of a near future dystopia that is deeply connected to current issues as well as the thought experiment of what an enclosed all women society would look like in this world. I enjoyed getting to see the assumption that this type of society would be inherently better challenged and, in doing so, getting to see the failings of cishet white capitalist feminism highlighted. Jacqueline Millender, our matriarch of this society, is a perfect personification of all that is wrong with this type of feminism. Just like so many cishet white feminists today, she pays lip service to equality for all while still enforcing the same power structures that plague society. This was all done pretty well even if it was a little heavy-handed at times.
While Gabrielle Korn does a good job giving us a villain to despise, the rest of the character work falls short. For the most part, I liked Ava and Olympia and Ava’s daughters Brook and July, but I was never able to connect with any of them. This was mostly down to two things. Firstly, the omniscient third person POV added too much distance between me and the characters. I could never empathize with them because I was never given a chance to live in their emotions. I was told how they were feeling, but it was usually done in a factual, “tell not show” way. Secondly, the switching between so many character POVs and how chaotic the switching was made it hard to really sink into any one character’s perspective. For the majority of the book, you never knew who’s story you were going to get next.
Then there’s Shelby. I was very excited to see a trans femme character in a story with such a strong feminist message. From her mention in the dust jacket summary to her prominent role in the first act, I hoped that the story would do her character and her story justice. I also hoped the story would say something impactful about the ways in which trans women are treated by many centrist liberal feminists today. Ultimately, though, Yours for the Taking fails to do any of that in any meaningful way. After the first act, Shelby practically disappears from the narrative. She reappears in the third act, but her story still takes a backseat to the other characters. Even when Jacqueline is challenged on her position towards trans women, it mostly comes from the cis characters in the story and not Shelby. The reveal that Jacqueline tokenized Shelby is also done so briefly that it barely lands as anything more than a “yeah, that happens”. All in all, it really sucked to see a character I wanted to connect with be so underused in a story in which there was a lot of potential for her.
I also had issues with the overall structure of the story. The second act felt incredibly slow and all over the place as new characters were introduced. It really killed any momentum I had to read the book. On the other hand, the third act happened so quickly and with such an easy resolution to the central conflict that the entire thing felt incredibly anticlimactic.
Overall, Yours for the Taking is a good idea that was not executed well. Between the choice of POV, the abandonment of a main character in favor of other characters, issues with pacing, and an anticlimactic climax, I was left disappointed and wishing for more. Yes, we get to see how terrible feminism for some but not for all can be, but not in a way that is groundbreaking or memorable. In the end, there’s not much to take away from this book.
