I’m a librarian, and I feel like I’m living in resistance to a patriarchal dystopia, so when I came across UPRIGHT WOMEN WANTED, a book that touts itself as a story of librarians working in resistance to a patriarchal dystopia but IN AN OLD WEST REVIVAL (derogatory), I decided it was both close enough and far away enough to merit a read.
Esther is the daughter of a powerful political man, and has been raised to be a proper daughter of one: she’s betrothed to a man with future powerful prospects and does her duty reading state-approved materials disseminated by the Librarians. But she has a secret: she’s in a romantic relationship with her best friend Beatriz. And when Beatriz is executed in front of her, by her father, for reading “inappropriate’ materials, she runs away from her life to join the Librarians, in hopes of correcting what is wrong with her and finding her way back to proper womanhood. Here’s the thing: it turns out the Librarians are a bunch of queer people using the library covered-wagons as a way to move endangered people and illegal materials under the guise of propriety. Esther quickly falls for one of the bunch, a nonbinary apprentice named Cy, and now has to decide if everything she knows was right or if she was never a proper young woman after all.
This is a novella, which was nice (always feels good to finish a book in a couple of nights) and has a fast pace too. The setting certainly feels frighteningly familiar, with librarians carrying the onus of queerness and true information in a state that wants neither of those things. For me the narrative has a couple of things working against it: Esther as a character is only moderately compelling next to her costars, mostly because everything she has to learn are things readers like me already know. So there’s not a lot of suspense in her journey. Two, it turns out the Librarians are really only that in name, as far as I can tell. Which is fine! But I would love a prequel to see if this was a movement that authentically came out of the library network, and if there are struggles between the Librarians serving the state and Librarians serving the resistance – because in this book, it seems like if you are in the resistance and one of the people moving things, you’re a Librarian (that being said, I expect in this world, there’s no such thing as a masters degree in libraries or any sort of formal expertise, since being a librarian to the state just means being a nice lady who provides access to propaganda). But that’s just me being a librarian and being nitpicky, ha!
The next book in the series looks like it’s about a different group in the resistance (Downright Scoundrels Needed) and I might pick it up to see how the world is further built, and who knows, maybe I’ll get a little more of that information I’m seeking. Still, it’s a good pass-the-time romp with very topical stakes.
