I just finished this book. I read it too quickly because I was so curious about what was going to happen. I may need to come back for a slower read in a few months.

I thought the writing was great and some of the sentences were superb. Definitely thought provoking, and would make for a great (and lengthy!) conversation on a number of topics.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There will be SPOILERS!

I’m about 1/3 of the way through the book and

!!!SPOILERS!!!

feel sort of let down that they’ve escaped the bunker and are just wandering around a deserted plain. I know people love this book and some even claim it’s THE book they can’t stop recommending, but I’m growing a little bored. And it feels like the climax has already happened, yet I have 100 more pages? Does something else spectacular happen soon? Should I keep at it?

Don't ever read The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, lol.

Hated both books lol!

Really, really hated The Alchemist but loved I Who.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There will be SPOILERS!

I’m about 1/3 of the way through the book and

!!!SPOILERS!!!

feel sort of let down that they’ve escaped the bunker and are just wandering around a deserted plain. I know people love this book and some even claim it’s THE book they can’t stop recommending, but I’m growing a little bored. And it feels like the climax has already happened, yet I have 100 more pages? Does something else spectacular happen soon? Should I keep at it?

Don't ever read The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, lol.

Hated both books lol!

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I recently finished the book as well. After seeing it mentioned all over BookTok, I felt compelled to read it. I didn’t love it!

I understand it to be a philosophical think piece, but it didn’t land for me. Sure, I had questions: Who? What? Where? Why? But from a psychological standpoint, and coming from someone who worksas a psych major and as someone who works in the field) everything else makes complete sense, especially when considering everything we know about the mind and psyche.

I didn't think the where, when, why mattered at all to the book. To me it was about what it means to create your identity and live your life and interpret your desires and find purpose without cultural influence or society or even company.

This is a great synopsis. I finished it a couple of days ago. I'm not sure if I liked it, but it was successful in making me think. Questions like why go on living at all? Where does the protagonist's motivation to do so come from and does she ever truly accept that no one will ever come?

I was very disquieted by all the other bunkers and found it a little strange that none of the women voiced regret at not setting off earlier - they could have saved some of those people (my assumption was that the others died of starvation).

A fun literary exercise would be to invite authors to write short stories that expound on some of the unanswered questions in the book.

I was left wondering something similar: what if the Child had set off herself, alone, and left the slower women behind? They had food and shelter there. Could ALL of the others have been found and saved? Could she have applied the same mathematical logic and found them all in quick succession?

Or, would things have turned into anarchy? Alone, the group had their own government of sorts, it’s even described in the book.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I recently finished the book as well. After seeing it mentioned all over BookTok, I felt compelled to read it. I didn’t love it!

I understand it to be a philosophical think piece, but it didn’t land for me. Sure, I had questions: Who? What? Where? Why? But from a psychological standpoint, and coming from someone who worksas a psych major and as someone who works in the field) everything else makes complete sense, especially when considering everything we know about the mind and psyche.

I didn't think the where, when, why mattered at all to the book. To me it was about what it means to create your identity and live your life and interpret your desires and find purpose without cultural influence or society or even company.

This is a great synopsis. I finished it a couple of days ago. I'm not sure if I liked it, but it was successful in making me think. Questions like why go on living at all? Where does the protagonist's motivation to do so come from and does she ever truly accept that no one will ever come?

I was very disquieted by all the other bunkers and found it a little strange that none of the women voiced regret at not setting off earlier - they could have saved some of those people (my assumption was that the others died of starvation).

A fun literary exercise would be to invite authors to write short stories that expound on some of the unanswered questions in the book.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I recently finished the book as well. After seeing it mentioned all over BookTok, I felt compelled to read it. I didn’t love it!

I understand it to be a philosophical think piece, but it didn’t land for me. Sure, I had questions: Who? What? Where? Why? But from a psychological standpoint, and coming from someone who worksas a psych major and as someone who works in the field) everything else makes complete sense, especially when considering everything we know about the mind and psyche.

I felt the same way! The Child felt strangely like a pick me. Even in the cage, she was oddly wise beyond her years and intelligence level. It didn’t add up. No one had taught her anything yet she was so precocious and blatantly sassy?

I get the Holocaust connection. I get the philosophical questions. But I just didn’t find it that deep. And I agree, the most thought provoking questions WERE the who/what/when/where/how. Everything else is basic Homo sapien brain functioning.

To me this points to the universal way of all teenagers, no matter the circumstances in which they are raised.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I recently finished the book as well. After seeing it mentioned all over BookTok, I felt compelled to read it. I didn’t love it!

I understand it to be a philosophical think piece, but it didn’t land for me. Sure, I had questions: Who? What? Where? Why? But from a psychological standpoint, and coming from someone who worksas a psych major and as someone who works in the field) everything else makes complete sense, especially when considering everything we know about the mind and psyche.

I didn't think the where, when, why mattered at all to the book. To me it was about what it means to create your identity and live your life and interpret your desires and find purpose without cultural influence or society or even company.

I’m not sure she exists outside culture or society—she’s formed within the bunker’s own distorted version of both. That world provides her first language of fear, routine, and relationship. When she later loses it, she experiences the same rupture the older women felt upon entering the cage: the loss of a shared framework that made the self coherent.

I thought she's very much outside the culture of the bunker both in experience and ability. She is forming her own identity in part in opposition to the women but also as someone whose formative experiences are relatively blank until she encounters the cage. I agree, maybe not without culture or society but within and opposed to one that is fractured and partial.

But how is that fundamentally different from us? We also live within overlapping, fractured, and competing cultures. We’re constantly negotiating identities in relation to people whose values, histories, and assumptions differ from our own; colleagues, neighbors, friends from different cultural backgrounds. Opposition to a culture doesn’t place you outside it; it’s one of the ways you exist within it.

Even if we say her formative years are “blank,” they’re not blank in any neutral sense. They’re blank except for the women and the bunker. Her first language, her first model of authority, her first understanding of fear, routine, discipline, even solidarity, all of that comes from that enclosed world. So if her experience and abilities differ from the older women, that difference still emerges from the same cultural soil. It’s a variation within the system, not an escape from it.

In that way, she resembles the older women more than it might first appear. They were shaped by the world before the cage and then violently severed from it. She’s shaped by the cage and then severed from that. Both experience rupture from the only shared framework that made their identities coherent. She isn’t outside culture, she’s formed in a fractured one and then forced to confront its absence.

So maybe the real question isn’t whether she exists outside culture, but whether the novel suggests that any self can.