It must be said
Katherine Bradley's new book is a substantial improvement of what has been a
relatively bad bunch. What marks Bradley’s book out is it retells the story of
Julia from Orwell's book 1984 from a far more left-wing and even working-class
perspective than even Orwell contemplated. Julia and her fellow members of the
Sisterhood organisation try to reach a common platform with their male
counterparts in the Brotherhood to launch a joint campaign against Big Brother.
This cuts across the current right-wing MeToo movement's insistence on keeping women's
struggle separate from their male counterparts. For them, this is just “a
feminist retelling of Orwell’s beloved story, this time written from Julia’s
perspective.”
Mainstream media
platforms have largely ignored the book, and it has come under attack from more
right media outlets, such as the UK’s Daily Telegraph. Jessa Crispin wrote in the
Telegraph, “We have, whether we like it or not, entered the second wave of
rewriting classic tales to align them with modern-day social sensibilities
about women, people of colour, and other marginalised groups who were prevented
from writing and publishing their own stories for too long. People are
rewriting “Little Red Riding Hood” like Angela Carter never happened. The
latest in this soon-to-be-remaindered trend is Katherine Bradley’s The
Sisterhood, a feminist update on George Orwell’s more referenced than read (and
let’s be honest, for good reason) 1984.”[2]
The response from
working-class men and women has naturally been very different. The book has
been well received. Writing on Goodreads, Shelves_by_sim wrote, “This book was
riveting, haunting, exceptionally well-written, terrifying and fantastic. Not
only was the story brilliant from the beginning, but the entire book was so
metaphoric it made my hair rise! Julia's thought process was so cutthroat and
straight to the point. The story was the right amount of intriguing,
captivating and utterly horrific. The author wrote at the end that she hoped
George Orwell would have approved, and I think he certainly would have. The
characters! The plot twists! The hope! The shock! The horror!! I loved the read.
I don't read much dystopian, but this book was phenomenal.”[3]
This is well worth a
read, and previous knowledge of the work of George Orwell is a must but I would
highly recommend this book.
[1] See http://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2023/11/julia-1984-by-sandra-newman-published.html
and http://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2023/09/wifedom-by-anna-funder-penguin-books.html
[2] This feminist update of 1984 won’t
bother Big Brother- https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/sisterhood-katherine-bradley-review-feminist-update-1984-.
[3] https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/147376927-shelves-by-sim
