I picked up Vox by Christina Dalcher for one reason: Julia Whelan narrated it. That’s it. I didn’t read the description. Didn’t look at reviews. Just hit play and let it happen.
And then it happened to me.
I became a woman who counts her words.
Not metaphorically. Literally. After listening, I started tracking how many words I was using — on work calls, talking to my kids when they got home from school, telling my husband about my day, chatting with my friend during our morning workout. I tried to keep count for just one hour. One hour. And 100 words was gone before I’d even said anything that mattered.
I’m an introvert. I’m the person who gets talked out by the end of a workday and doesn’t want to say another word to anyone by dinner. And even I cannot fathom being limited to 100 words a day. What do you spend them on? Your kids? Your job? Your marriage? What if you're having a terrible day and all you want to do is scream? Does the counter clock that as twenty words because you screamed for thirty seconds?
I became a woman who thought, even for a second, that it might be nice to stop.
And this one is harder to admit. Because there are these moments in the book like when the women can’t work, can’t get the mail, can’t really do anything but cook and clean and take care of kids, where a tiny, exhausted part of me thought: what if that was just... one day? One day where nobody expected me to run a business and be a great mom and handle the doctor appointment booking or school calls and work out and be a good wife and a good friend and a good daughter and still somehow take care of myself.
But the book won’t let you sit in that fantasy. Because the bracelet is there. The counter is there. And the cost of that “simple” life is your voice. Your daughter’s voice. And the brain of every little girl who should be learning sixty thousand words and is stuck at six thousand because the government decided she didn’t need them.
I became a woman who regrets not voting.
There's a scene where the main character reflects on the fact that she didn't vote. When all of this was happening around her, the slow creep of laws, the gradual erosion of rights, she didn't think it was important enough for her to show up.
I put the book down. Because I’ve been there. Maybe I shouldn’t admit that, but I have. There have been moments where I genuinely thought one voice couldn’t possibly matter. That my showing up or not showing up wouldn’t change anything.
This book sits you down and makes you feel, all the way through your body, how wrong that is. Not in a preachy way. Not in a lecture. Just in the way the story unfolds. How it shows you, through flashbacks, that none of this happened overnight. It crept. And the people who could have stopped it were busy thinking their one voice didn't count.
I became a woman who needs you to read this book.
Vox didn’t just make me angry. It made me angry in a way that felt personal. The kind of angry where you're not yelling at the book. You're yelling at yourself. At the world. At how close some of it feels to something that could actually happen.
Christina Dalcher wrote a story that could have been one thing, a dystopia about silenced women, and made it so much more. The main character has real problems beyond the hundred-word rule. The twists are genuinely surprising. The ending earns itself.
And Julia Whelan narrating it? She made me feel every single word. All hundred of them.
Vox by Christina Dalcher. Five stars. Listen on audio. And then go count your words for a day. I dare you.
I listened to Vox on audio, narrated by Julia Whelan. If you want your own copy, my Bookshop.org link supports indie bookstores and tosses a few cents my way.
If you only got 100 words today, who would you spend them on? Your kids, your partner, your boss, the stranger who cut the line at pickup? Tell me in the comments. I know mine, and it’s not who I’d want it to be.
Ok. I’m absolutely sold. I think Vox has only been mentioned in my periphery once.
You mentioned this book in another post a few days ago and I was like, this sounds interesting. And now I am definitely going to read it. Thanks for sharing!