Before She Sleeps by Bina ShahIn modern, beautiful Green City, the capital of South West Asia, gender selection, war and disease have brought the ratio of men to women to alarmingly low levels. The government uses terror and technology to control its people, and women must take multiple husbands to have children as quickly as possible.
Yet there are women who resist, women who live in an underground collective and refuse to be part of the system. Secretly protected by the highest echelons of power, they emerge only at night, to provide to the rich and elite of Green City a type of commodity that nobody can buy: intimacy without sex. As it turns out, not even the most influential men can shield them from discovery and the dangers of ruthless punishment.
I was excited to read this book. The author is from Pakistan so I thought she'd have a unique perspective. While there are similarities to Handmaid's Tale, this book isn't nearly as good. It was an intriguing premise but I felt she could have done more with it. Some of the women resist being child-bearers and escape to an illegal group that provides companionship for men and not the sexual type. I liked the idea of focusing on men's emotional needs but it wasn't explored very deeply. There was a lot of potential for this book, she could've done much more with it.
