Sarah O'Connor

“Without faith, there is no refuge,” (Bazterrica 41).

A woman living with a mysterious convent secretly documents her life with the Sacred Sisterhood after escaping a now inhabitable world destroyed by climate change. An unworthy, our narrator hopes to become one of the Enlightened and has accepted the Sisterhood as her home, but when a stranger appears within the convents walls, some of our narrator’s past memories come back to her as the Sisterhood begins to shed itself in a new light.

Bazterrica’s most infamous novel is probably the BookTok hit Tender Is The Flesh, which I own but haven’t read yet. When I learned another of her books was being published I put myself on the holds list at my library and luckily didn’t have to wait too long for it. It seems a lot of readers advise going into Bazterrica’s works blind, or at least going in knowing as little about the book as possible. Aside from knowing the book featured a woman living in a violent Sisterhood, The Unworthy was a mystery to me. And while I enjoy going into a book blind and experiencing the plot for myself, The Unworthy doesn’t make it any clearer exactly what is going on.

The setting seems to be some indeterminable future where the world, and people, have suffered due to serious climate change. Floods have destroyed buildings, and then drought has come. The ground is poisoned and nothing will grow, and in the panic of the world dying people have turned violent. Adults attack children, groups of men assault women. As the world dies so does our humanity. All of this is revealed slowly to us by our unnamed narrator who had blocked out the trauma of survival once finding her way to the Sisterhood, though the Sisterhood itself remains a mystery. We never learn how they were founded or what exactly it is they want, only that most of the women who have found themselves inside their walls have done so out of survival, and that being tortured and living in the violent conditions of the Sisterhood is preferable than the world that exists outside the convent walls.

There’s a bit of The Handmaid’s Tale in this through the epistolatory nature of an unnamed woman recounting her past in a dying world and her present in the Sisterhood. I enjoyed reading from the unnamed narrator’s perspective and really enjoyed her voice. Despite the unanswered and unclear moments in the book, I liked how the theme of hope, love, trust, and healing persevered despite the horror of the books surroundings.

The Unworthy is a book that, despite it’s short page count, is a thought-provoking and at times tender story of survival. I can’t wait to read more of Baazterrica’s work!

Publication: September 1 2023
Publisher: Scribner
Pages: 192 pages (Hardcover)
Source: Library
Genre: Fiction, Dystopia, Science Fiction, LGTBQ+
My Rating: ⛤⛤⛤⛤
Summary:

From her cell in a mysterious convent, a woman writes the story of her life in whatever she can find—discarded ink, dirt, and even her own blood. A lower member of the Sacred Sisterhood, deemed an unworthy, she dreams of ascending to the ranks of the Enlightened at the center of the convent and of pleasing the foreboding Superior Sister. Outside, the world is plagued by catastrophe—cities are submerged underwater, electricity and the internet are nonexistent, and bands of survivors fight and forage in a cruel, barren landscape. Inside, the narrator is controlled, punished, but safe.
But when a stranger makes her way past the convent walls, joining the ranks of the unworthy, she forces the narrator to consider her long-buried past—and what she may be overlooking about the Enlightened. As the two women grow closer, the narrator is increasingly haunted by questions about her own past, the environmental future, and her present life inside the convent. How did she get to the Sacred Sisterhood? Why can’t she remember her life before? And what really happens when a woman is chosen as one of the Enlightened?