How could this happen? Well, the question is answered in microcosm as Jean’s husband, Patrick, stands on and does nothing as his son becomes increasingly volatile, hateful and hostile towards women.

They also allow Dalcher to develop the world she has created the television set booms news from a Pure World where LGBT communities suffer in internment camps, infidelity is outlawed and public shaming is ritual and nightly. Taut and engagingĬertainly, the early chapters, where Jean tries to educate and communicate with her family using the limited means available to her, are taut and engaging. The scenes between Jean and her son, as he belittles her and drifts further away into some murky unknown with its own distinct set of rules, are tense and engrossing, and Dalcher understands how ideologies can cause irreparable familial rifts. Steven, Jean’s eldest son, decries the loss of morality and home values in the US, as he leans towards some fictional faction of the far-right. Dalcher is especially effective on how language contorts and confuses, and how certain words and ideas delivered by an adult to a young person can leave a lasting and immovable impression. When we first meet Jean, she’s the mother of four children in the suburbs – three boys and a progressively quiet girl – still demonstrating her own domestic resistance. In response to the steady rise of women’s voices, and particularly the honesty and force of these voices throughout the #MeToo movement, Dalcher is asking: what if we were silenced? And how long would it necessarily take to be starved of language? They are kept in check by bracelets that deliver electric shocks if they step out of line, a nightmare dystopia for any woman who's ever been told to not get lippy by a man.

Set in a present just like our own, with a president who enjoys being on television, women have been reduced to speaking just 100 words a day. In Vox, however, words matter and none can be wasted. Maybe a few thousand.' She concludes that the words are 'semantically vacuous', meaningless, throwaway.

Late in Vox, Christina Dalcher's debut novel, the narrator reflects: 'I don't know how many times I've said 'I could kill him' in my 40-odd years.

Vox christina dalcher review