Women Talking

Toews has become one of Canada's leading novelists by writing with insight, sorrow, humor, and anger about the patriarchal Mennonite community in which she was raised. So how would she deal, in fiction, with a horrific (and true) incident in another Mennonite colony—the systematic drugging and rape of the colony's women by many of its men? Not as you might expect: the incident itself is offstage, replaced by the conversations of women as they, long kept isolated from the world around them, debate the ethics and efficacy of reform, revenge, and rebellion, finding the language of personal politics as they speak it, almost like a Continental Congress welling up in the attic of a barn as they wait for the men to return. It's rousing, subtle, and provocative.