Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey Book Review

Have you ever read a preachy, condescending twitter thread about a woke topic (Hey kids! Buckle up while I tell you all about how OPPRESSION is BAD. [1/97] ) and thought, oh boy, I wish I could read an entire novella just like this! And maybe the novella could have some aesthetics thrown in, like, a Pinterest board with a horse or something, and a cowboy hat. Then boy, do I have the book for you!

Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey follows a girl named Esther who is running away to join the Librarians, a gun-toting, horse-riding group of women who deliver Approved Materials to towns in a near-future Western-themed America. If that sounds cool, I’m sorry, because this book fails to deliver on its premise in absolutely every way. (Spoilers ahead!)

The Romance Esther is a lesbian. Or something. She is described in-text as a ‘woman who likes non-men,’ either because the word ‘lesbian’ doesn’t exist in the future, or the author believes that ‘lesbian’ does not encompass nonbinary identities. Lesbophobia, amirite guys? Esther was previously in a relationship with Beatriz, who was just hanged the other day for possessing Unapproved Materials of some kind. What Unapproved Materials did Beatriz have? What did they say? What was she doing with them? Oh, don’t worry about all that. So Esther has just watched the love of her life swing on the gallows which is pretty distressing, as one might think, and she does cry about it for an hour or two. However, all tears are banished when she meet Cye the Librarian who is just absolutely smoking hot, guys. Cye is also nonbinary, but has to pass as a woman in towns, which is painstakingly explained to us about four times, as if we are very stupid. Oh, you’re saying, so if Cye has to pass as a woman wouldn’t you maybe illustrate that in a scene where they’re passing in a town or something, rather than clunkily, through dialogue? Yes. You would think. “I’m they on the road and she in town. You can take time getting used to they on the road, but if you forget about she when we’re in town, you’ll have to learn how to think around a bullet.” Makes sense, right? No? Well, here’s some more explanation, only two paragraphs later. Just in case you didn’t get it.           Esther thought she’d gambled right. “Why are you different in town than on the road? Why not just be one thing?” “Did you ever meet anyone who used they instead of she or he? Or did you only ever read about that in stories?” Cye paused, but not long enough for Esther to reply. “That’s what I thought. It’s not safe to be they in town, no more than it’s safe for Bet and Leda to be anything but Librarians who happen to ride together. When there’s people around who we don’t trust, we let them think we’re the kinds of people who are allowed to exist. And the only kind of Librarian that’s allowed to exist is one who answers to she.” By the way, every time they encounter people, Cye reminds Esther about the ‘they on the road she in town’ thing. Just in case you forgot, in the span of this 176-page novella. Anyways, Cye and Esther have a kind of bland romance, and Esther is not conflicted at all by her previous girlfriend having died two days ago, in front of her. Sorry, Beatriz!

The Characters There is almost no interpersonal conflict in this book. Any issue that comes up is instantly resolved, which ends up giving everything a strange, unreal feeling, as if all the characters are paper bag puppets, and the horse foley is being provided by coconut halves. Esther is a runaway, and her father is the mayor of something or other. We learn that her dead girlfriend’s… husband? Is some guy named Silas who is a really bad dude and who, after Beatriz’s death, wanted to marry Esther instead. And this was so distressing to her that she ran away. Ooh, you’re saying, so Silas, who is built up as this bad dude, is totally going to reappear in a climactic moment at the end of the book and she’ll have to confront him? No, he is not. He never appears again at all. Neither does her father. So, no need to worry about all that lame backstory.  Esther stows away on the Librarians’ wagon, and they discover her in a tense scene!! But after a nice heart to heart about Esther’s dead lesbian lover, the Librarians, Bet and Leda, reveal they too are lesbians, and they’ll let her ride with them for free, so there goes that. Esther then meets the aforementioned Cye, who appears to dislike her. Ah, some conflict! I thought. But after sort of sniping at Esther, all conflict is resolved by both characters instantly being super horny for each other. Watching your girlfriend swing on the gallows is a pretty powerful aphrodisiac, I always say. The group also starts smuggling this other group of women who are oppressed for being polyamorous. Only one of these three poly women has any bearing on the story at all. The other two women do absolutely nothing and have no personalities. I forgot they were there. Esther herself is all over the map. She swings wildly from one kind of characterization to the next, completely bending to whatever is needed by the scene. She’s never ridden on horseback before, and at one point, she comedically wonders what word is used to stop a horse. Two paragraphs later, she’s attacking bandits on horseback and pulling off stunts as if she’s been in the saddle her entire life. The crew calls her a bookbinder when they’re in a town, so she decides to take up bookbinding. She’s randomly, instantly good at it with no instruction, because she’s just a genius like that! She’s also kind of soppy, and spends a lot of time thinking, like, Gee, I wish I could become one of those Librarians someday! Repeated to the point where you start thinking, Gee, I hope Esther gets hit over the head someday!

Identity This book felt like a Twitter checklist about representation, coupled with threads explaining exactly what each type of sexuality was, and how it’s okay to be that, and how they are vaguely oppressed in some undefined way. Never does a character face actual consequences in a scene for their identity, except for Beatriz, who dies before the story starts. The book spends large swathes of time in between towns, with the characters discussing oppression and how ‘people like them’ aren’t liked, but we pretty much never see any of the towns from the inside, and the characters never experience any hate, ill will, or discrimination, etc. from the average person. In fact, ‘the average person’ literally does not feature in this book. Besides some faceless bandits and one or two checkpoint guards, our characters almost never interact with any townspeople or average folks onscreen. Which leaves you wondering if they’re actually as oppressed as all that. Honestly, the representation featured here is so sanitary, so absolutely devoid of any heart or emotion or stakes, that I thought I was going to become homophobic reading it, and I’m a lesbian. Now, for all the sexualities paraded by in this book like a Bank of America Pride float, there is one facet of identity that is entirely missing from this book, its characters, its worldbuilding, its everything, and that is race. Characters are occasionally described as ‘black,’ or ‘brown,’ but racial oppression is never mentioned, or even hinted at. In fact, it’s implied that the only oppression in this Future America is the oppression of, uh, polyamorous people? Brown skintones are painted onto characters like a lazy character designer using colorfill, and nothing is done to make anyone feel like they are from a distinct place, ethnic group, or community. You would think that this book, being, ostensibly, a western, might want to draw on the tradition of Mexican cowboys, but a dead character named Beatriz is as far as it goes. I won’t even give Gailey a pass for being white and not wanting to appropriate; If they didn’t want to engage with racism, then they shouldn’t have chosen a genre intimately connected with racial issues (westerns) and shouldn’t have chosen to set the book in actual, real America.

The Worldbuilding [Deep sigh] Okay, so it’s Future America, and all the states and stuff are still there, but for some reason America is divided into four Quadrants. This is unexplained. There’s also something called the Corridor, which is where all the Soldiers are who are fighting a War. What the War is and who they’re fighting in the War is, you guessed it, unexplained. Apparently it’s the future and so supplies are scarce because all the Soldiers are rationing things (You know, for the War), and so that’s why everyone’s on horseback and stuff. Cars seem to exist but no one has them except for the Soldiers. We never meet any Soldiers, by the way. In this Future America, it seems like gender roles have gone back in time and are much more rigid, as only men can be Soldiers and women are supposed to stay on the homefront. It is never explained what kind of restructuring has happened to make everything this bad, as, even these days in present America, women can totally join the army. I guess we’re supposed to infer that it’s some sort of Handmaid’s Tale situation, except without all the, yknow, worldbuilding that’s present in Handmaid’s Tale. Um, also, the three states that are strongholds of the Insurrection/Rebellion are… Florida, Maine, and Utah, of all places. It’s never explained where all the Mormons went, or why it’s historically pretty conservative places that are now rebel safe havens. Because, you know, why bother?

The Prose The prose is straight up bad. Actions are over-described and weird. There’s a ‘western’ flavor inserted in which is mostly made up of similes that are as clunky as the wagon they’re riding on. (See, I can do it too!) Once you’ve read characters saying something along the lines of ‘You’re as grumpy as a toad in a water hole jumpin’ over a sheriff in a cowboy hat!!’ every other sentence for a few pages, you get a bit tired of it. And by a bit I mean I wanted to chew the book up with my teeth.

The Moral of the Story Um, so this book is basically trying to do some kind of banned books/gay people thing, but it has all the subtelty of a thing that is not subtle at all. Characters commonly soliloquize about the dangers of Believing Everything You Read In Approved Materials and The Importance of Distributing Unapproved Materials. Esther thinks that gay people are all supposed to have an unhappy ending because that’s what she’s read in books, but she learns the importance of being able to Write Her Own Ending and Make Her Own Story!!! Hooray!! God, I’m so tired. I give this book 0 out of 5 Unapproved Materials. I wish I could scrub it from my mind.

Recommended Reading: If you wish to read books about the power of the written word, check out: Fly by Night by Frances Hardinge The Truth by Terry Pratchett If you wish to read books about near-future apocalyptic America, check out: Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (Warning: these are not nice reads, because near-future apocalyptic America would not be nice