By Naomi Kritzer

I’ve written before about how Kritzer is basically a Cassandra of our time for better or worse. The better is that she remains ultimately hopeful about humanity and its basic goodness. The is worse is, well, the current political environment.

In Obstetrix, an ob/gyn who has just been acquitted after providing the last abortion in North Dakota, is kidnapped by a Christian fundamentalist cult to provide birthing services. Kritzer packs a lot of plot and nuance in a fairly short novel for a very propulsive read. It’s a little bit Handmaid’s Tale, but like Kritzer’s stories is more ultimately optimistic.

The back blurbs describe it as “chilling, gripping, all too real” and “an intense day-after-tomorrow thriller,” which I worry could turn off non-horror readers. This is most definitely not a horror and to my mind, not particulary scary, though it is, of course, a bad situation to understate it a bit. I guess for me this feels like an action thriller through the female gaze. Instead of large-scale shoot-em-ups, Kritzer is more interested in the small details of daily life and how one balances safety with resistance to authoritarianism within that space.