Rating: 
Summary: Best Feminist Utopia Yet
Review: Reading Turning on the Girls felt like reading a mystery novel -- instead of finding a killer, though, you're finding out whether society might be sustainable along lines of feminine values (values that themselves are not uniform among women). Cheryl Benard uses a light touch and a fair amount of wittiness in dramatizing feminist theory in a modern setting, with characters that are quite well enough portrayed to enable suspension of disbelief. The analysis of pornography and romance fiction is enlightening without hitting you over the head -- I especially delighted to find out that Ayn Rand's is basically a romance novel sensibility. You get the feeling that Benard wrote the book as an exploration, not to lead us willy nilly to a foregone theoretical conclusion. Her male characters are very generously characterized, and the best surprise of all was how all the major characters were seen as fair-minded and ethical. To imagine, even in the context of this book, that a considerate and ethical society can be a sustainable one was enough to make my day. Let me finally point out that this book is likely to be in all the feminist bookstores around the world -- or if it's not, it should be -- and that they need our support to stay in business.
Rating:
Summary: THIS IS THE BEST BOOK EVER WRITTEN
Review: This book is unreal. Hysterically funny, unbelievably thought-provoking, and thouroughly amazing. It is, beneath the hilarity and wit of the characters and the suspense of the complex plot, a fantastic journey into the study of power and gender. I am a lesbian and I don't even want her world to happen! You will NOT be able to put it down for a millisecond. Benard, you are a true genius.
Rating:
Summary: absolutely fabulous
Review: This is not just one of the most inventive and hilarious books I've read this year, it's one of the funniest ever. Benard has you laughing on just about every page. She takes the idea of a world in which women are charge and uses it to skewer --well, just about everybody and every idea even remotely p.c. It's the kind of book you want to call your friends to quote lines from. (And even my husband was laughing out loud when I read him parts.) Benard has just got such a great, rollicking voice, and no target is taboo. Combine that sense of humor with an appealing main character, Lisa, who is charged with the difficult task of finding new ... fantasties for women in the new world order, and her charmingly clueless sidekick, Justin (who's being reeducated in a series of nine month long courses), and you've got a very fun book that also makes you reconsider your own preconceptions -- which is what the very best fiction does: reveals the world to you in a completely fresh way. So be warned: if you don't like to have your view of the world challenged, if you can't stand the idea of sacred cows being taken down, and you can't laugh at the foibles of men and women alike, this book isn't for you. But for the rest of us, we couldn't ask for a better, more clever guide to the absurdities of gender warfare.
Rating:
Summary: great comedy
Review: What a great book. I was laughing from the opening pages and didn't stop til the wonderful ending line. I suppose as a man I should be offended that women have taken over the world and men have to be re-educated, but Benard is so evenhanded in her satire of the human species you'd have to be crazy not to love the book, and the world she imagines. Or maybe you'd write a review without actually having read the book; who knows. All I can say is I am ordering her previous book, which seems very different than this, but anyone who can make me laugh so much I'll follow anywhere.
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