I'm around 70 pages in since last night. This one has already won some awards, including the Aurealis, and been shortlisted in another. It's a dystopian novel in which a small village is located in a valley formed after a rockslide long ago. It's run by the Mothers and girls are valued more than boys because they can be sent, if good enough, into the mountain to harvest mica, which, in this world, is useful for heat and light. They need an alternative to wood fires because in the winter the snow comes right up to the top of the houses and smoke can't escape theough the chimneys, though they do have escape pipes.
I must admit I never knew mica could be used for that! Must look it up.
So, these girls have to be small in order to squeeze into the tunnels. They're swaddled for their first few years, they eat as little as possible and if they're not quite small enough, well, bones can be broken and rearranged... The chosen girls receive training and are formed into teams to go harvest mica. Then they do something else for the rest of their lives, including having babies, preferably females - the whole village parties when a girl is born.
I can't help wondering, though, if these people have, as it seems, been stranded in this valley for quite a few generations, wouldn't the gene pool be rather small? Everyone would be related to everyone else. That hasn't been mentioned yet, but still a couple of hundred pages to go. The soil would be rather poor after being farmed all that time, so I can only assume they have a three-field system.
Anyway, more to come!
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