The Island of Lost Girls by Manjula Padmanabhan

The Island of Lost Girls by Manjula Padmanabhan

I am very slowly working my way through the works of Indian writer Manjula Padmanabhan. Very slowly; I last read one back in 2017, almost six years ago!

 

Originally published: 2015
Acquired and read: January 2023

Padmanabhan works in many genres, but she writes a lot of science fiction, which is how I discovered her. Most of her sf is short, she has written one sf novel, Escape (2008). This is set in a future dystopian India, one where all women have been eliminated. The men reproduce through cloning, and neutered "drones" carry out the undesirable labor. There's just one woman left alive, Meiji, and Escape chronicles her attempt to escape the country in the company of her uncle (but actually her father), Youngest. It ends with them (if I recall correctly) making it over the border, implying a sequel.

When I reviewed it in back in 2015, that sequel seemed very unlikely: "I hope the sequel that the ending indicates ought to happen really does come to pass, though seven years later, I have my doubts." But what I didn't know is that after I wrote that review in May but before it posted in September, a surprise sequel had been announced and released! So now I am finally reading that long-awaited follow-up, though so many years on, my memory of the original book is vague.

 

The Island of Lost Girls begins with Youngest crossing into the outside world, carrying Meiji on him in a sort of stasis chamber. Youngest has been forcibly made into a woman by the General, the misogynist ruler of India, and the General is letting Youngest go forward as part of a plan to dominate the outside world as he has dominated India. The opening is captivating and intense, as Youngest tries to navigate customs and immigration and find help without being taken advantage of; I liked the woman he meets, Aila, who like Youngest was born a man, but she wanted to transition, unlike him.

 

The novel, however, lost me when Meiji is taken from Youngest and sent to the titular island to be mentally rehabilitated by a group of women, though they steal her memories. The first novel had clear stakes and a strong throughline, but I found this one very amorphous and circular. It's frustrating for a novel about the oppression of women to make its main female character so unessential to the narrative; Meiji's scenes didn't have clear points to me. I wasn't sure what she was trying to do. Which, I think, is the point, but that still leaves it frustrating. Similarly, I felt the stuff with Youngest trying to get to the island (to rescue Meiji and/or do the bidding of the General) went on and on, and the stuff about the deadly competitive games in the outside world seemed tacked on.

 

Weirdly, the part of the novel I tended to enjoy the most were the scenes of the General waiting on his yacht with Aila, I suppose because he had a clear goal and strong desires, no matter how abhorrent, as did Aila. I knew where those scenes were going! 

The opening has the worldbuilding I enjoyed so much in Escape, but once the action moves to the island, the novel feels too confined. Even if it would ultimately turn out that Meiji and Youngest needed to "escape" again, I think it was a mistake to reduce the scope in the sequel instead of opening it up.

Next in sequence: Getting There