After a nuclear war, there are three surviving societies: the Professors, an elite group of survivors who form scattered enclaves of civilization sustained by farming; the Barbarians, nomads who have survived outside the bunkers, raiding the Professors' villages for supplies and food; and the Out People, mutants who have been mutilated by the radiation, inhabiting the ruins. The protagonist, Marianne, is a Professor's daughter. As a child, she witnesses an attack on her village during which a young Barbarian kills her brother. She grows more and more bored with life among the Professors, so at the age of sixteen, following her father's death, she willingly helps a Barbarian warrior during another attack and runs away with him to his tribe. After her attempted escape and rape by her dark companion Jewel, she is forced to marry him and discovers that he is the one who murdered her brother. Their relationship is ambiguous--erotic and antagonistic--but eventually, when Marianne gets pregnant, she allies herself with Jewel to overthrow the power of Donally, the renegade Professor and the tribe's shaman as well as Jewel's tutor, who introduced the Barbarians to the power of myth and ritual. When Jewel is killed in an ambush, Marianne decides to become a new leader of the Barbarians, a Tiger Lady determined to "rule them with a rod of iron" (This synopsis and a deep and philosophical analysis that I can't fully understand, you can find in Highbeam)
I personally don't find this post apocalyptic world convincing, perhaps the book has not aged well. I didn't like it, I find it simple, needlessly brutal and Manichean, and won't spend more time with it.
Please, if you liked it, tell me why because I admit that sometimes I'm unfair to certain books that I've read at the wrong time in my life, and knowing they are worthwile, I can retake them in another time and be able then to acknowledge the merit and grace in them.
