Eleven Percent opens with a promise: Lilith, Adam’s first wife, reclaiming power. I was intrigued. A world where the patriarchy has fallen? Where the divine is feminine, menstruation is sacred, and women are in charge? Sign me up. But the novel’s execution didn’t quite deliver on its compelling premise.

Set in a speculative matriarchy, Uthaug’s story is fragmented across multiple perspectives—Medea, a snake-breeding outcast; Wicca, a reluctant priestess with irregular periods; Silence, a mute sister haunted by the past; and Eva, a trans woman hiding her history. Men are now the subjugated class, kept in state-run centers for sex and reproduction, and religion has been restructured around “the Mother.” While the setup is rich with potential, the storytelling left me disoriented more often than intrigued.

Uthaug’s writing is provocative and heavily symbolic—there’s a lot of blood, snakes, sex, and ritual—but the narrative felt more like a collage than a cohesive whole. Just when I began to invest in one thread, the perspective would shift again. And while the novel critiques the dangers of flipping oppression rather than dismantling systems, it leans too heavily on shock value without anchoring it in a believable or emotionally resonant world.

By the end, I wasn’t sure what had happened—or how I was meant to feel. The ambition is admirable, and I appreciate its refusal to hand us easy answers. But it’s hard to follow a story when the world-building is this thin. This is one of those books where the concept is sharper than the execution. If you’re drawn to religious reimaginings and dystopian gender satire, it might spark something for you. For me, it was more confusing than compelling.

📖 Read this if you love: dystopian explorations of gender, provocative theological reimaginings, and speculative fiction that asks more questions than it answers.

🔑 Key Themes: Matriarchal Power Structures, Cycles of Oppression, Gender Essentialism and Ritual, Feminine Erasure and Control, Myth and Reclamation.