Boliva, a remote Mennonite colony, 2009: over 100 women aged 2-60 discover that the wounds they've been waking up to find covering their bodies were not the work of the devil, but rather of their fellow male colony members. When the men leave to try and bail the accused out of jail, the illiterate women with little knowledge of the outside world are left alone to decide their fates. This charged and philosophical novel, told through the women's meeting minutes, is based on a revolting true story.Publisher's description:
One evening, eight Mennonite women climb into a hay loft to conduct a secret meeting. For the past two years, each of these women, and more than a hundred other girls in their colony, has been repeatedly violated in the night by demons coming to punish them for their sins. Now that the women have learned they were in fact drugged and attacked by a group of men from their own community, they are determined to protect themselves and their daughters from future harm. While the men of the colony are off in the city, attempting to raise enough money to bail out the rapists and bring them home, these women--all illiterate, without any knowledge of the world outside their community and unable even to speak the language of the country they live in--have very little time to make a choice: Should they stay in the only world they've ever known or should they dare to escape?