Tritcheon Hash is a novel by Sue Lange.
[I got this book from a LibraryThing Early Reviewer Give-Away. I am not early with my review, but honest.]
Finished on: 27.8.2018

Plot:
Tritcheon Hash lives on the planet of Coney Island. Coney Island is home to only women: after all the male violence on Earth, the women just up and left. Now men and women only see each other once a year at the sperm against male babies exchange. Things have been going smoothly for a while and talk of reunification have been stirring. But since Earth is covered in a cloud of pollution, making satellite observation impossible, Coney Island needs to send a spy there in person to see if the men are ready again. The chosen spy is Tritcheon who leaves her wife and kids behind to take on the mission – which reconnects her to her own past.

I think that Tritcheon Hash thinks that it’s making some kind of feminist point but that point completely backfires. And narratively it didn’t blow me away, either.

This is the second novel of Lange’s I read and much like The Textile Planet, I just didn’t really warm to Tritcheon Hash either. From a narrative point of view, it reads like the backstory to the actual story, only when the actual story is about to start, the book is over. The last few chapters read like Lange ran out of steam and just quickly summed up what she wanted to happen – but didn’t actually want ot write anymore.

And the gender politics are extremely muddled here, to say the least. With a concept like that, if you don’t consider trans people or non-binary people, all you do is re-affirm the gender binary. Plus, when it turns out that Tritcheon once met a man and fell in love with him and has been secretely pining after him all this time (and vice versa) – the entire way that love story between her and Bangut plays out, just makes it seem like heterosexuality is the natural order of things and the lesbian community built on Coney Island is forced and unnatural.

Ultimately all of this makes the novel more sexist and heteronormative than if it hadn’t tried to make a feminist point at all (if that really is what it sets out to do). And it made for pretty frustrating reading for me.

Summarizing: didn’t work for me.