There's a meaty speculative sci-fi hook at the heart of this read: suddenly, everyone with a Y chromosome disappears. What follows is a rush of ideas - political, social, scientific - as society is reformed by women, in the absence of men. Fragments of weirdly otherworldly material are intercut throughout, while at its core are grounded and grim stories of sexual and racial abuse and ongoing trauma. The effect is disorientating and compelling.
That night it seemed every woman in New York was on the streets, and Ruth stopped sometimes to join a knot of heated strangers: people saying UFOs had been sighted over Washington, D.C.; people saying a volcano had erupted in Hawaii that emitted a strange green light; people saying all the men had been abducted by China. Once Ruth was caught up in a rush to the Hudson, where someone thought she'd seen a man swimming, but it turned out to be a drowned woman. Later, Ruth walked up Broadway with a young Pakistani woman who'd been diagnosed with stage 3 ovarian cancer just last week, and now this .... Ruth walked her to Mount Sinai, in front of which a long line of grim-faced women were waiting for admission. It turned out the woman could go straight in. The line was for people who had lost their babies. At the moment of the disappearance, every male fetus had vanished from the womb.
