A Brother’s Price
by Wen Spencer
316 pages
In this book the roles between male and female are reversed. Women rule the world and men are chattel, without rights, used as breeders, care giver for the children he sires, and homemaker. The cover shows the moment that changes the course of a family's life. A very young girl defends a strange woman in uniform, the girl runs back to the farmhouse to let her younger sisters know what has occurred. Her big brother helps bring the unconscious back to the house, they don't know that she is a princess. ( )

In a world where women dramatically outnumber men, Jerin Whistler spends his time cooking meals, tending his younger siblings, and hoping that his sisters will marry him off to a suitable family. But things begin to change after the Whistlers stumble upon a treasonous conspiracy and Jerin falls in love with five princesses.

A Brother's Price juggles plenty of genres -- science fiction, Regency romance, Westerns -- but cheerfully sticks to the lowest cliches. The shotguns and gunboats are flashy but inconsistent; the romance is entirely predictable; the SF themes are completely pasted on. The reversed gender roles have dramatic effect but no logic. In the end, your enjoyment of A Brother's Price will hinge on how amused you are to read the hero described as looking "adorable in his plum silk tunic and flowing trousers." ( )

A fascinating alternate world that is built up in such an interesting way. This story focuses on Jerin Whistler, the oldest Whistler boy of 4 sons and nearly 30 daughters. Boys in this society are so rare that they have a single role in society: father children. Jerin only hopes he won't be married to the unappealing neighbors, the Brindles. But after saving a woman in the woods, things take a turn for intrigue.
I love this book. I find the world fascinating and the characters interesting. For me it was definitely a can't-put-it-down book. I finished it in a single night and I was glad for it. ( )

(Before I start gushing about it, I should say: this book has a lot of potentially disturbing content, and basically a constant underlying threat of gendered violence/rape/etc towards male characters. It didn’t bother me, but I could easily see it bothering others.)

I remembered being HELLA sad when I was done reading this book (especially after discovering there were no sequels), and, yeah, very much the case again now. I could keep following these characters and this world basically forever. I love them so much! Beautiful, clever Jerin. Eldest Whistler, Ren, and Halley giving us so many different flavors of badass! Cullen being this world’s equivalent of a tomboy, but cleaning up so nicely.

The narrative voice is pretty straightforward but there’s something I really like about it? It’s so effortless to get sucked into. I love how protective everyone is of Jerin. I love the setting. I love that this is just a dumb, wonderful romance with a side of palace intrigue and military swashbuckling. I love how the gender flip plays into all this.

Most of all, I just love being able to, even briefly, live in a world where the expectation of AMAB people is that they’re pretty and soft and need to be protected and cherished. That you’re expected to be more nurturing, more gentle, more submissive. This book meant a lot to me when I read it early on in college. I was in the middle of questioning my gender identity and sexual orientation, so having something that played with gender the way this did as just a baked-in part of the setting was just so exactly what I needed. As I reread it now I do find myself at timmes wishing that it had been done differently. Specifically I don’t like the idea that men had to be more scarce to sort of justify why society developed the way it did? And the society presented here does not seem to have any room in it for transgender and nonbinary individuals, or even AMAB gay people. (Nor is there much room for lesbians, though lesbian sex does at least come up a few times.)

Oh, and there’s the fact that everything is based on procreation. Procreation is… not something I’ve ever been interested in. I’m ace, actually, so the whole scarcity of males and desperate need for the ones that exist to procreate would… really not work for me? So all the aforementioned is obviously not great for me in terms of wish fulfilment. But idk? Even taking it all into account, at times this book is just… perfect. I just want to slip right into Jerin’s shoes.

Yeah, it isn’t a perfect fit for me, because in this fictional society boys are still expected to eventually be comfortable being called “men,” and… yeah. That one will never really work for me? I’ve tried being a cis boy, a trans girl, an enby, an enby boy… that last one has stuck alright, even if it at times has seemed ironic that I found my way back to some kind of boyhood, but one thing I have never at any point been comfortable with is the word “man”?

And before you start worrying, I get that in actuality, it will be better for everyone (including me) to fight for a more egalitarian society, and I’m certainly never going to ADVOCATE for a society like this one, but… still… having had such a hard time carving out a gendered space for myself that makes any kind of sense, and having to explain and justify it all the time… it’s hard to read something like this and not wish that I could just wake up in a world where my kind of boyhood is the default assumption.

(... on the other hand, I kind of love being neutered, and that is VERY much something that world wouldn’t let boys do. Shrug.)

It’s a pity there wasn’t a sequel, and doesn’t seem to be any sign the author is considering one. Aside from my aforementioned misgivings about it, I really want more books in this setting. Or at least a similar setting. I’ve kind of scoured the internet for recommendations for similar books, and I’m gonna try reading a few that popped up in that search, but I’m not sure I’m gonna find anything that will quite hit this exact same spot.

There’s a flippant part of me that wants to say “maybe I’ll just write one!” but I’m not going to pretend for even a second that I could do so nearly as skillfully as Wen Spencer did. On top of all the wish fulfillment, this is just such a terrific read! I just really, really didn’t want it to end. ( )

Good, very readable. A particularly good place to examine the hero/heroine tropes, since the male/female roles have been swapped. Jerin certainly takes the traditional place of the sought-after and protected heroine, but he also seems to share the role of the hero with several of the women. ( )

Not available as an ebook, but I've had the paperback for a long time.

A stand-alone in an interesting alternate universe with a wildly skewed gender imbalance. Female births outweigh male births by 90%, and the 'Lords of Creation' aren't lords, but Ladies. Males are protected and kept at home until they marry into another family or enter the 'cribs'. At first glance, it looks like a Western novel written by a feminist who has completely swapped gender roles around and not gone any deeper than that. It's a bit deeper than it seems - the hero of the book is basically a feminist - except he's a male. It would be interesting to read more in this world - there's intriguing hints of the dominant religion - the worship of Hera, and the novel appears to be set in North America with six guns and paddle steamers. However, if it is North America there is no mention of a Native American population.

It's somewhat similar to Patricia Wrede's Frontier Magic series, except there we are explicitly told that the first settlers in North America found no human population, only the magical mega-fauna. It's a little romance-y, but it doesn't detract from the story of the brother who is about to hit marriageable age - this idea is that he will marry well enough to bring his sisters a decent husband.

Recommended if you can track down a copy.

From the synopsis and the few reviews I skimmed, I was expecting this to be an incisive work of speculative fiction and satire, based on the premise of a world where gender roles are flipped due to a paucity of men in the steampunk world of Queensland.

It's not *quite* that. It's more of a Harlequin (Alternative) Historical romance with a cutesy gender-flipped premise. I read my share of those in my teens so I don't mind it but...I can't help but feel that the premise is a bit wasted. Under another author's pen, the tale of a capable young man being married off to a royal house to secure the fortune of his many sisters could be dark, hilarious, insightful, or any number of things. Under Wen Spencers it's just...*cute*. And weirdly so, since any reader of darker speculative fiction will immediately ask themselves questions and realize that Queensland kind of *sucks*. On the list of fictional places I would never want to live it's somewhere in between Arrakis and Westeros.

But there's lots of love and (cut-to-soft-focus) consummations of undying polyamorous love, so hey! I guess everything is alright.

It's not a bad book, just a little too twee for me. ( )

This is comfort food, but it's GOOD comfort food. Fantasy world with inverted gender roles (only one man per 20 women, group family marriages ensue). It follows the Regency romance arc perfectly except for leaving out that relationship building part in the second third, which actually might've been better to include. But it's really enjoyable – takes the gender role reversal seriously, isn't stupid about it, but also clearly just has a lot of fun telling the story. ( )

Light, entertaining read. ( )

Described by brownbetty as "[b:A Handmaid's Tale|38447|The Handmaid's Tale|Margaret Atwood|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1255648830s/38447.jpg|1119185] if it were a romantic comedy". Men are scarce, and treated like old-timey-ladies, in a slightly fantastical landscape.

(Re-posted from http://theturnedbrain.blogspot.com)

Do you know what I hate? When you’re recommending a book to someone, or maybe you’re just telling them what the book you’re currently reading is about, and as soon as you say it’s science fiction or fantasy you get the look. The ‘oh, you like reading that stuff? Mine is a more refined taste.’ Seriously, I hate it. Half the time these people who disregard speculative fiction so readily barely read at all, or they only read what their favourite famous person tells them to, and I’d bet they’d never really tried to read a fantasy novel before.


Yeah, I sure do hate those people. Ignoring that fact that, well, I am one of them. ‘What are you reading?” I might ask. (But I promise I won’t interrupt your reading to ask you because I hate that as well). “Oh,” you’ll reply, “it’s this really good romance-” Whoops, and now I’m giving you the look. Romance? Really? I don’t read that stuff myself…


So you’ll imagine my surprise when a quarter of the way through A Brother’s Price I realised that what I had thought was going to be a light science fiction story was actually a romance novel. I couldn't even justify it and say it was science fiction with a romantic subplot, it was definitely a romance with a science fiction sub plot. It was trashy romance with a thin, wavering science fiction subplot.


If I’m being really honest I would say that apple flavoured bubble gum has more in common with fresh apples than A Brother’s Price does with actual science fiction. Its concept- what if one man was born for every ten woman- doesn’t seem to be more than an excuse to pepper the novel with some of the worst examples of the helpless woman stereotype I have ever seen, except the helpless woman are actually men, so that makes it ok apparently.


The women ride about tending to the land and keeping the law and drinking beer straight from the bottle, while the few men in the book stand about wringing their hands and getting rescued by the women. The female characters are strong and independent, while the males either passively accept what the women say is best (and are thus marked as good), or are prone to tantrums and sulking, (and so we know they are bad). What I’m trying to say is, if Price hadn’t done a gender switch this book would probably offend anyone with half a brain, or else not got published at all.


Even with the gender switch, I’m troubled. Spencer is a decent writer, nothing overly impressive but her words are clear and the plot (what there is of it) cracks along. Her female characters have depth, believable and unique motivations, flaws and scars. So really there’s no excuse for her male characters being such shallow caricatures that always seem to be one shock away from a fit of the vapours. Possibly Spencer was trying to make some kind of cutting social comment that I didn’t catch, but I have a nasty suspicion that she wasn’t doing it intentionally, that it was more of a ‘oh, look, the women are acting like good strong men and the men are wringing their hands like silly woman!’ kind of deal. Which bugs me, actually.


And even if we forgive this, there’s just so much potential here that gets wasted. The base concept is sound, and Spencer does touch upon some interesting implications of a society were men are a scarcity. The world has a sense of real history, with a major civil war that ended only a generation before still effecting the land. The problem is Spencer wastes much of this potential, discarding everything that does not serve the romance between a farmboy and the royal family. I think if the novel had of focused on the farmboy's grandmothers, who we learn were spies in the civil war and kidnapped a prince to be their husband, I suspect this would have been a far better book. Or if we focused on the royal sister Hayley who is AWOL on a mission of revenge for much of the book, or even if the plot between Farmboy and the sisters had have involved more than loving gazes and walks in the gardens, it would have been a better book.


Which I guess is like saying if it were a wholly different book, then I probably would have liked it. If romance is your thing give this one a shot, but just don't tell me because I might give you the look... ( )

Interesting premise and decent world building. I'm not sure that's how women would respond to the rarity of men, or that men would be kept pure until marriage (well, women had to refrain from sex, too). But I like the story, which was kinda sweet, with enough twists and turns to keep the reader's interest. There were too many tell and not show in regard to Jerin's looks. All in all, I like it, though I like Fumi Yoshinaga's Ooku: the Inner Chambers better if we're talking about the same premise with women far outnumbering men. ( )

An amusing read and an interesting inversion of gender roles. Which is pretty much the reason I liked it - it showcases how masculinity and femininity are socially constructed.

The language is a bit difficult to follow through at times, though. ( )

For the first third of the book, I wondered why I had ever bought it. I've read a few too many gender-bending books, and I expected this to be just more of the same. I was mildly interested in the characters, so I kept reading, wondering whether it was going to be more of a western (which I would probably like) or more of a paranormal romance (which I probably wouldn't).

Suddenly, at a certain point in the book, I realized that I was reading a SFnal murder mystery. All sorts of scenes that had seemed to be picaresque digressions suddenly snapped neatly into place; they had been added to provide unobtrusive but necessary clues.

From then on, I thought it was really good, so good that I reread it at once as soon as I'd finished it, just to appreciate the author's skill at clue-dropping. It's a good, solid world, too, very well built; it stands up better than most to close scrutiny. ( )

In a world where the male/female ratio is heavily distorted towards women, men are property. At best they’re husbands to families of sisters; at worst constantly drugged and kept in brothels to be raped. Upper-class sexual morality is similar to our Victorians, though, possibly because STDs are widespread, so a respectable young man can be ruined by sexual contact with a woman not his wife. I had high hopes that the setup would do something interesting with the role reversals, but actually the plot is all about palace intrigue and our young ingenue Jerin falling in love with the royal sisters and having adventures where his plucky determination gets him through even though lesser men would fail. Though Jerin has a couple of thoughts about how much it sucks to be property and to be raped, he buys into the system, and as far as I can tell none of the royal sisters ever even have those couple of thoughts. Given initial conditions, this is plausible—Jerin benefits in many ways from being pretty and of sufficiently noble blood, and, well, they’re royal sisters. However, I hated every one of these people and their general satisfaction with their Elizabethan-lite world and their dismissal of lower-class “river trash” as worthless. While I choose to read the last happily-ever-after paragraph in the same light as “He loved Big Brother,” I rather wish I hadn’t even started. Oh and also, almost ironically, though the book specifies that men like Jerin have long tresses and military women at least have buzz cuts, the cover image shows what looks like a man with shoulder-length hair carrying a long-haired woman. Blech. ( )

one of those books you stay up half the night reading, but wonder why in the morning. ( )

Very absorbing. Every time the male blushes or wears lace, it jars. As it is meant to do.

What does society do to cope with a radically reduced male viability? You shelter and protect, removing as many hazards as possible, or open whore houses (cribs) for those who can't afford to buy a husband.

Nurture is given enough scope, with male behaviors formed and molded as children; but Nature is given no credibility, as male hormones and their resulting aggression patterns are not addressed.

Nicely examines qualities that make a person desireable.

Wen Spencer does some interesting things with the “female dominated society” trope that appears in science fiction and fantasy from time to time in this book. From my reading of The Shore of Women, Glory Season, The Gate to Women’s Country etcetera, whenever this story appears, it is usually clear that the writer has an axe to grind about gender politics. Spencer is mainly attacking the “females are not innovative” meme and the “females are naturally more peaceful and nonaggressive” memes that occasionally appear in these works. A Brother’s Price seems to be mostly a response to the axe grinding, than to gender politics. It is at its base a historical romance fully of derring-do and plucky heroes, and there is no sense that the society is “superior” to a male dominated society--it is just different from a male-dominated one.

The worldbuilding behind the story is that the male population has been severely reduced due to sexually transmitted diseases that result in the miscarriage of male infants. It is not a recent occurrence however; there are indications that this has been the state of affairs from prehistoric times onward. (Compare and contrast to Ooku: The Inner Chamber by Fumi Yoshinaga, where Edo period Japan has been reduced to a mostly female population due to a disease that _targets men.)The entire society, culture and religion in A Brother’s Price is based around keeping men cloistered and separate for their own “protection,” and so that women can have children. In this culture, men are married off at an early age to groups of sisters. The wives pay the sisters for marrying the brother.

Read the rest of this review at A Wicked Convergence of Circumstances ( )

Do you know what I hate? When you’re recommending a book to someone, or maybe you’re just telling them what the book you’re currently reading is about, and as soon as you say it’s science fiction or fantasy you get the look. The ‘oh, you like reading that stuff? Mine is a more refined taste.’ Seriously, I hate it. Half the time these people who disregard speculative fiction so readily barely read at all, or they only read what their favourite famous person tells them to, and I’d bet they’d never really tried to read a fantasy novel before.

Yeah, I sure do hate those people. Ignoring that fact that, well, I am one of them. ‘What are you reading?” I might ask. (But I promise I won’t interrupt your reading to ask you because I hate that as well). “Oh,” you’ll reply, “it’s this really good romance-” Whoops, and now I’m giving you the look. Romance? Really? I don’t read that stuff myself…

So you’ll imagine my surprise when a quarter of the way through A Brother’s Price I realised that what I had thought was going to be a light science fiction story was actually a romance novel. I couldn't even justify it and say it was science fiction with a romantic subplot, it was definitel a romance with a science fiction sub plot. It was trashy romance with a thin, wavering science fiction subplot.

If I’m being really honest I would say that apple flavoured bubble gum has more in common with fresh apples than A Brother’s Price does with actual science fiction. Its concept- what if one man was born for every ten woman- doesn’t seem to be more than an excuse to pepper the novel with some of the worst examples of the helpless woman stereotype I have ever seen, except the helpless woman are actually men, so that makes it ok apparently.

The women ride about tending to the land and keeping the law and drinking beer straight from the bottle, while the few men in the book stand about wringing their hands and getting rescued by the women. The female characters are strong and independent, while the males either passively accept what the women say is best (and are thus marked as good), or are prone to tantrums and sulking, (and so we know they are bad). What I’m trying to say is, if Price hadn’t done a gender switch this book would probably offend anyone with half a brain, or else not got published at all.

Even with the gender switch, I’m troubled. Price is a decent writer, nothing overly impressive but her words are clear and the plot (what there is of it) cracks along. Her female characters have depth, believable and unique motivations, flaws and scars. So really there’s no excuse for her male characters being such shallow caricatures that always seem to be one shock away from a fit of the vapours. Possibly Price was trying to make some kind of cutting social comment that I didn’t catch, but I have a nasty suspicion that she wasn’t doing it intentionally, that it was more of a ‘oh, look, the women are acting like good strong men and the men are wringing their hands like silly woman!’ kind of deal. Which bugs me, actually.

And even if we forgive this, there’s just so much potential here that gets wasted. The base concept is sound, and Price does touch upon some interesting implications of a society were men are a scarcity. The world has a sense of real history, with a major civil war that ended only a generation before still effecting the land. The problem is Price wastes much of this potential, discarding everything that does not serve the romance between a farmboy and the royal family. I think if the novel had of focused on the farmboy's grandmothers, who we learn were spies in the civil war and kidnapped a prince to be their husband, I suspect this would have been a far better book. Or if we focused on the royal sister Hayley who is AWOL on a mission of revenge for much of the book, or even if the plot between Farmboy and the sisters had have involved more than loving gazes and walks in the gardens, it would have been a better book.

Which I guess is like saying if it were a wholly different book, then I probably would have liked it. If romance is your thing give this one a shot, but just don't tell me because I might give you the look... ( )

Set in a very interesting world. Not without flaws, but nonetheless enjoyable. ( )

This may be the first and only time that I'll say this, so everyone should take advantage of it-I was wrong, my mother was right. For years, my mother has been urging me to read fantasy and science fiction novels, to branch out of my safe cocoon of romance books and thrillers. She's touted the works of Wen Spencer as being some of the best, and yes, now that I've had the privilege of reading A BROTHER'S PRICE, I announce to the world that my mom was, as usual, correct.

Kudos to Ms. Spencer for getting me so worked up with this book that I'm now compelled to seek out her entire backlist! With A BROTHER'S PRICE, we enter a world in which it's not oil, gold, or money that have the highest monetary value, but men. Men, as in male children born to mothers-an event that happens so rarely that male offspring are often hidden from everyone but immediate family, and that many of these children are treated as a commodity, bought, sold, traded, and sometimes stolen outright.

For the women of Wen Spencer's make-believe world-which, by the way, reads as oh-so-probable-having a male child is cause for celebration, joy, and secrecy. Due to miscarriages, still births, and unexplained circumstances, women have no trouble giving birth to a multitude of female offspring, but a boy is a very rare occurrence indeed.

For Jerin Whistler, a boy who's near to coming of age and the dreadful thought of being sold into a marriage of his sisters' choosing, taking care of a multitude of younger siblings isn't enough of a life. Taking care of the family farm-when's he let out of his sisters' sight-isn't the kind of life he'd imagined for himself, either. But with so many siblings, the majority of whom are girls, Jerin sees no other life but allowing himself to be sold into marriage for a "brother's price," gaining his sisters monetary gain to continue their way of life.

When a mysterious young woman named Ren is left for dead in the wilderness of the Whistler property, Jerin knows that it's his duty to bring the woman to safety and ease her back to health. What a surprise it is when he discovers that the beautiful Ren, for whom he's quickly falling in love, is none other than Princess Rennsellaer. For Jerin's family, all of whom are well-meaning despite their sometimes crass attitudes, Jerin's rescue of a true-blooded Princess is the chance they've been waiting for. All they need to do is return Ren to her royal family, arrange for her marriage to Jerin, and the family will be set for life.

As most stories go, however, nothing is ever that simple. Jerin finds himself swept up into royal politics, where some women will stop at nothing to make sure that men are never allowed into positions of power. As Ren and Jerin grow more deeply in love, as tempers rise within the royal family, and as continued attempts to kidnap the Princess need to be thwarted, Jerin realizes that marrying for love might not be as easy as he'd hoped.

I loved this book! A twist on the typical royal princess who wants to wait for her "one true love," Wen Spencer's world of too many women and too few men is all too believable. Jerin is a hero that anyone would be proud of, not only for his bravery and devotion, but for his desire to do whatever it takes to keep those he loves safe.

To my mom, thanks again for being right! And to Ms. Spencer, thanks for such a fabulous book. ( )

Before I say more, I want to say that I enjoyed this. I just wish I had enjoyed it more. It's listed on the spine as Science Fiction and the author is known for her SF series Ukiah Oregon as well as a fantasy novel or two. The only thing about this book that fits the SF genre is the role reversal of the sexes.

Men in this tale, which is set at past-like time from present-day Earth, are far outnumbered by the women and are, therefore, treasured. They're coddled and groomed to be sold into marriage. They take care of the children, lots and lots of children, they father with many, often dozens of wives. They are fairly docile and most can't read. Jerin is an exception in many ways.

After he helps rescue a princess who's been attacked, he comes to the attention of her sister Ren who falls in love with him and him with her. But given their disparate social standings, a union between them and her sisters is unlikely to be allowed. Except....

There's political intrigue, lots of "romance novel" situations made a tad uncomfortable with the young male character in the typical woman's role, and an air of predictability about this book. I figured out most of it ahead of the revelations, yet the revelations I was longing for didn't come. If these are humans, why are male births so few when in reality, the births of males to females is almost equal? Why do the men act so docile? It can't be lack of testosterone, because they look manly enough, despite hair kept long and clothes more feminine than not, and their equipment works just fine.

If not for the simple fact that a woman could not service so many men at once and keep up the population thusly, the roles could be reversed without much affecting the story. I could figure out if a point was being made or if the author simply had an idea and ran with it. The characters are likeable enough, but I never cared for them the way I do her characters in the Ukiah books. I don't like reading about fainting females and I like it just as little when it's the men doing the fainting, so to speak (actually, he vomited, rather than fainted). I kept waiting for resentful men to make an appearance or for a male uprising or some such, but the story focused on Jerin, and Ren, alternating between their povs. And that led to another problem. The lack of suspense.

Scenes with Jerin showing he was alive, when followed by scenes of Ren worrying that he was dead, instead of coming after the Ren scenes, diluted the tension. We the readers know he's alive so the suspense isn't there the way it could have been. Without that, the book has to rely on other factors to keep the story flowing. What works best for it is the breezy writing style that makes for fast reading. There certainly were few or no surprising plot twists to fill that role.

One thing that struck me in this sex reversal is that somehow, the male gets to play hero. If the purpose is to show how harmful denying equal rights and privileges to one sex can be, I missed it. If the point was to portray women as strong and men as weak, that didn't quite hit the mark, either, as it was Jerin's specialness, the training his sister's gave him in self-defense and such that enabled him to help save himself and others. While he had to rely on the women, he still provided the necessary means to their escape and he was the one who helped uncover the truth about assassinations the royal family suffered prior to the story. I suppose if Jerin had been female, this would have shown how resourceful women can be in a world where females aren't granted equality, but here, with the male in the female role, it just seemed silly.

A half dozen or so, that I spotted, grammatical errors that have plagued Spencers Ukiah books surfaced here, with sentences with repeated words ("he" before and after the verb, for ex) and other odd constructions, indicating poor editing or proofing.

I suppose a good test of a book is whether or not one would read a sequel. I would read one to this, but mostly to see if some of my questions are answered. If you're looking for a quick read, a book that poses an interesting situation and you don't mind that its potential isn't fulfilled, you might enjoy this. It can certainly help pass a lazy, hazy summer day. ( )

Intriguing concept for a world - women outnumber men nearly 10:1 - with engaging characters and a satisfyingly complex plot. ( )

Not as good as the Ukiah stories but very good. ( )

An interesting look at an alternate "old-west" society. It is an interesting adventure story . However, the surprise was how well it presents a gender twist that made me more aware of some cultural gender biases I didn't realize I had. ( )