This review begins with a question: How many stars do you award to an unconvincing book? The Book of Joan makes an interesting case, one that is argued fairly compellingly and laid out through a narrative that is both sweeping and attentive to detail (almost graphically so), but a case that entirely fails to convince me. Some of it is personal prejudice--I admit--but some is also a failure inherent in the genre. Yuknavitch's book relies on the performance of her ideological argument and, in doing so, she lays bare the results of that argument and they are deeply uncomfortable in a way that the intellectualized conversation, rather than the visceral narrative, would hide.
Clear as mud, right?
The Book of Joan makes the case against kyriarchy. It is a book that seeks to tear the image of modern man in all his incarnations and supplant the ideas of woman over man, brown over white, nature over industry, matter over mind, low over high, earth over human. The resurgence of the visceral, the embodied, and the erotic after modern man's grasp towards disembodiment...but Yuknavitch complicates that trajectory and, ultimately, fails when she can't figure out what to do with women. Are women the opposite of men or are women human and as such stand against Earth and fail? (Eve is just really confusing you guys). Yuknavitch isn't sure and she uses women both ways: Christine and Joan are, arguably, woman as failed human and woman against mankind respectively, but such distinctions fall away against the written lived reality of people being people. As signifiers, they always exceed what they signify (but who doesn't, really?) which makes them inconvenient for an ideological argument if interesting as narrative figures. Yuknavitch can't decide where to put women in this grand tale of reification as they are both hu-man and not-man and it makes everything very muddy and complex. As the real world ought to be, but the real world never lent itself to a good polemic.
And therein is the problem with this book. It fails as an argument because the characters are too strong and it fails as a narrative because the plot and story is too bound up in trying to make a point.
The book's dichotomies and Yuknavitch's clear partiality for the biological, the visceral, and the real allow her to craft a compelling post-apocalyptic story that engages in interesting ways with the question of humanity and how it is we completely mess everything up in our quest for heroics and legacy and life. This is where the contentious space of women becomes obvious: do we engender or do we destroy? And, again, I don't object to complexity, but it feels out of place in a story that otherwise revolves so strongly around a simple taking of sides.

This is most obvious in the most problematic aspect of the book, when a character's biological sex is used as a "gotcha!" moment. I think Yuknavitch is trying to talk about how toxic masculinity shapes the expectations on women, but I also think that the absolute last thing any book needs is "omigod, that man has breasts!" to provide shock value. And this is the real cost of using characters as figures in a morality play and trying to write an argument on the bodies of others.

It is a symptom of the book's own precarious position: Yuknavitch is making an argument against the very work she is doing. Narrative creation lands inevitable on the side of the hero and the mind rather than that of the collective and matter. Do I get to quote Lorde? Definitely. "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."
Which is why I don't precisely buy her dichotomies in the first place: the complexity that lurks beneath the surface of her thesis/antithesis overwhelms the setup and while that is precisely the point--the return of the biological reality over the intellectualization--its return undermines the very narrative she sets in place. For the point of the book to be successful, the argument has to destroy the narrative. It doesn't--the narrative wins by a small margin--but neither the argument nor the narrative is better for it.