Hello, Friends & Followers! I’m sharing with you my favourite reviews for my latest novel today. These critiques come from Amazon and Goodreads.
D. W. Peach – 5 stars
Can women rule better than men?
The future looks bleak for most of humankind. Almost 200 years from now, climate change has devastated the world—destroying food sources, breaking down societal norms, and allowing disease to spread. One part of the world is managing better than most – the island of Newfoundland in Canada.
There, a matriarchal society dominates, relegating men (called peons) to manual labor or to roles as consorts for breeding purposes. Once a day, they’re fed a serum that tempers their masculine natures. Women are fully in charge, allowing men few rights, chemically controlling them, and expecting full compliance.
Katrina (Kat) is eighteen and grew up believing that men are reckless, violent, and the cause of the world’s collapse. Then she meets a “rogue,” a man who slipped onto the island, seeking a cure for his three-year-old son’s disease. She must decide whether to turn him in or defy her community and help him. Kat and Marc (the rogue) are the most nuanced characters with the richest personalities and emotional backstories. They share the POV.
The plot is straightforward, and the story moves at a clip with some slower moments to get to know the characters and the island society, which includes a complete dismantling of the family unit. What I found most interesting was the author’s attention to gender-based power structures, including the obvious role reversals. Women, for so long treated as second class citizens and victimized by men, are now the oppressors.
Perhaps out of necessity, the elders of Wild Cove also exercise rigid control over the community’s girls and women, including Kat, who are assigned tasks and career placements with little or no input. To address a rise in infant mortality, teens are coerced into breeding. The female elders seem to think this is all for the good of humankind’s survival, and I’m curious to see how this plays out as the series continues.
Highly recommended to readers who enjoy post-apocalyptic and dystopian thrillers that raise some interesting questions about human nature, power, and control.
Atlanta Reader – 4 stars
A timely book – a dystopian future triggered by runaway global warming
This take on how global warming could wipe out civilizations around the world is a bleak one that should make us try harder to save our precious planet. The novel focuses on a community in Newfoundland, in northern Canada, where there’s a ray of hope far from the equator. That’s where a matriarchal society is struggling to survive with the “help” of men who are kept as well-treated slaves for their labor and breeding services. It’s an interesting depiction of how even well-intentioned leaders can set up a government that tramples the rights of the many. Besides the oppressed male population, this also includes all the communally-raised girls who are told what they can and cannot do, with precious little room for personal choice. It’s a system ripe for revolution.
18-year-old Kat is something of a rebel who secretly helps Marcus, a “rogue” who arrives from farther inland, even though she’s been taught that men are evil. Will Kat risk her community’s welfare and go against lifelong anti-male indoctrination to help him? Will Marcus succeed in his urgent mission to find medicine to take back to his dying family? The story is told in an unhurried fashion so it takes a while to learn the answers. And the ending leaves open the possibility that the story could continue.
A novel for readers who enjoy dystopian fiction and the “what ifs” that hang like storm clouds over the increasing threat of runaway climate change.
Carrie – 5 stars
Great read
This dystopian novel is an ambitious book that delivers on all fronts. I easily got lost in its pages. Great world-building, vivid descriptions, and dimensional characters who are easy to root for. I loved the feminist bent as well, along with the Eastern Canadian setting. All in all a great read!
Bruce – 5 stars
Great read start to finish!
This author, J. Kelland Perry, has a style that makes you keep the pages turning and want to find out more of this world in the future. A story of a “What if” scenario that is filled with rich details of survival and growth by a matriarchal society on an isolated island. I would love to see this book turned into a movie.
Amelia – 5 stars
The Women of Wild Cove by Jennifer Kelland Perry is a striking and imaginative post collapse novel that redefines the dynamics of survival and power. Set on a matriarchal island off Newfoundland’s coast, the story fuses speculative world building with intimate emotional depth. Perry crafts a society led by women, sustained by cooperation and communal caregiving then boldly explores what happens when that balance begins to falter.
Through Kat’s journey, readers are drawn into a moral crossroads where compassion and conformity collide.
Her secret encounter with Marcus, a wounded outsider, forces her to question the ethics of her people’s rule and the boundaries of love, freedom, and sacrifice. The novel’s tension between idealism and control between nurturing and domination gives it rare philosophical resonance.
Perry’s prose captures both the serenity and volatility of her world, reflecting the beauty and fragility of a civilization rebuilt on principles of equality. The Women of Wild Cove is both a compelling survival tale and a reflective social allegory one that lingers as a meditation on what humanity must protect to endure.
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I am also wishing all of my American friends and bloggers a very Happy Thanksgiving. 🧡
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