《Testament of Jessie Lamb》是一本由Jane Rogers著作，Sandstone Press Ltd出版的Paperback图书，本书定价：GBP 7.99，页数：272，特精心从网络上整理的一些读者的读后感，希望对大家能有帮助。

　　《Testament of Jessie Lamb》读后感(一)：DAILY MAIL 22 Aug 2019

　　DAILY MAIL 22 Aug 2019

　　cience Fiction Reviews by Harry Ritchie

　　THE TESTAMENT OF JESSIE LAMB

　　Jane Rogers's eighth novel - longlisted for this year’s Booker and unaccountably published by a tiny press based in Dingwall - is set in the very near future, when women have suddenly started to die when they fall pregnant.

　　As society starts to crumble under the strain of so many deaths and the threat of species extinction, and while her parents’ marriage wobbles, 16-year-old Jessie Lamb tries to do something to help.

　　Then she finds what she thinks is a solution - to sacrifice herself by becoming one of the Sleeping Beauties, young girls who will undergo pregnancy in an induced coma, give birth to a healthy, implanted embryo, and then die.

　　ut Jessie’s father, who’s one of the scientists battling the probably man-made catastrophe, has other ideas.

　　Great writing, and amidst all the mayhem, a wonderful evocation of teenage confusion, passion and idealism. Marvellous.

　　《Testament of Jessie Lamb》读后感(二)：DAILY MAIL 22 Aug 2019

　　DAILY MAIL 22 Aug 2019

　　cience Fiction Reviews by Harry Ritchie

　　THE TESTAMENT OF JESSIE LAMB

　　Jane Rogers's eighth novel - longlisted for this year’s Booker and unaccountably published by a tiny press based in Dingwall - is set in the very near future, when women have suddenly started to die when they fall pregnant.

　　As society starts to crumble under the strain of so many deaths and the threat of species extinction, and while her parents’ marriage wobbles, 16-year-old Jessie Lamb tries to do something to help.

　　Then she finds what she thinks is a solution - to sacrifice herself by becoming one of the Sleeping Beauties, young girls who will undergo pregnancy in an induced coma, give birth to a healthy, implanted embryo, and then die.

　　ut Jessie’s father, who’s one of the scientists battling the probably man-made catastrophe, has other ideas.

　　Great writing, and amidst all the mayhem, a wonderful evocation of teenage confusion, passion and idealism. Marvellous.

　　《Testament of Jessie Lamb》读后感(三)：Times Literary Supplement 6 May 2019

　　Times Literary Supplement 6 May 2019

　　ocial sacrifices

　　LUCY DALLAS

　　Jane Rogers THE TESTAMENT OF JESSIE LAMB 240pp. Sandstone Press. £7.99.

　　978 1 905207 58 9

　　Jessie Lamb is a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl who lives in Britain with her parents, hangs around with her best friend, Sal, and has her eye on a boy called Baz. This ordinary life begins to unravel as a virus, Maternal Death Syndrome, spreads rapidly around the world, a splicing of the AIDS virus and the prion disease CJD. Every woman who becomes pregnant dies shortly after the pregnancy has become established. At first, Jessie does not take much notice, preoccupied with her own concerns, but as family and friends are affected and kidnappings, mass conversions and social upheaval begin to be the norm, she becomes deeply implicated. She discovers social activism and rejects the adults who have made such a mess of the world; after a while, however, protest and withdrawal are not radical enough for Jessie, who wants to make a grand, sacrificial, world-saving gesture, despite the distress and anguish of her parents.

　　The novel is presented explicitly as Jessie's testament, opening with a diary-style entry in which it becomes clear she is being held against her will by someone she knows, in order to prevent her from taking a rash course of action. She then retraces her story and leads us right to the point at which her future will be decided, though she has left this decision, to a certain extent, up to fate. In the first diary entry she expresses the feeling that "I must do something, I must do something or else explode. That I must find the thing I was destined to do". This belief in fate is balanced by logic and rationality, mostly supplied by her father, a scientist who discusses the issues behind the headlines with Jessie and is concerned that she think for herself. When she does, coming to a conclusion which he finds horrifying, he then tries to stop her. As well as dealing with her own emotional and family problems, Jessie is forced to consider the position of women in the world, now that biology really is destiny, and the effects of the virus - apparently an act of bio-terrorism - on the stability of social order and civilization.

　　Jane Rogers has captured Jessie's voice brilliantly, alternating a teenager's solipsism with a growing awareness of the wider world. Jessie's self-conviction is both admirable and infuriating, and the reader is torn between her clear, unequivocal conclusions and the intricate, heartfelt compromises of her parents. The Testament of Jessie Lamb opens with a quotation from Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis, and although we are left to draw our own conclusions, the hint would seem to be that a society ready to sacrifice young girls, willingly or not, does not end well.

　　《Testament of Jessie Lamb》读后感(四)：INTERZONE Issue 236 Sep-Oct 2019

　　INTERZONE Issue 236 Sep-Oct 2019

　　The Testament of Jessie Lamb

　　Jane Rogers

　　andstone Press, 240pp, £7.99 pbk

　　Reviewed by Andy Hedgecock

　　In Jane Rogers’ eighth novel a near future dystopia is created through an act of biological terrorism. Her portrayal of a society in crisis, in which social cohesion is collapsing, established values are corroding and personal freedoms are under threat, has already drawn comparisons with Attwood’s The Handmaids Tale, P.D. James’ The Children of Men and Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.

　　In essence the book tells the story of 16 year old Jessie Lamb, who is being held against her will in a suburban house. The narrative switches between terse diary entries detailing her experiences as a captive, and more freeform reflections exploring her life and concerns. As the story unfolds, these two strands of testimony reveal the identity of her captor, the reasons for her captivity and the full nature of the catastrophe afflicting her world.

　　One of Jessie’s most memorable musings concerns what she believes to be the saddest song ever written: Love Will Tear Us Apart by Joy Division. It’s so apt to Jessie’s story, on so many levels, that it could have provided an alternate title.

　　In part, this is a coming of age novel, wittily observed but heartbreaking, enchantingly garrulous but deeply unsettling. It deals with notions of identity and belonging with the conviction, passion and flair of Iain Banks’ The Crow Road, David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green and J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. Jessie could rival Holden Caulfield as a caustic observer of the inauthentic and insincere. But sadly for her, and everyone else in her world, there’s more to this story than teenage angst and alienation.

　　Rogers uncovers the consequences of the biological apocalypse with a series of pull backs and reveals that would be the envy of a consummate crime novelist. A new virus, known as MDS or Maternal Death Syndrome, has been created and unleashed by an unidentified terrorist group. MDS, we learn, is universal in terms of its transmission: the whole of humanity carries it. It is, however, highly selective in terms of its morbidity and mortality patterns, in that it attacks the central nervous systems of pregnant women. The disease is rather like a fast-forward variant of CJD: its victims rapidly exhibit signs of dementia, personality change and cognitive deterioration. And they die soon afterwards. Women, who are dying by the million, develop a profound fear of pregnancy. Humanity is forced to contemplate the prospect of extinction and the established socio-political order begins to collapse.

　　Meanwhile, as scientists struggle to find a cure, people reject established institutions and join fundamentalist religions and militant protest groups. For a while, Jessie and her friends deal with their despair at the hand human folly has dealt them by joining a latter day children’s crusade against the moral and ecological sins of the fathers. Then, a vague glimmer of hope for the survival of humanity is presented by the Sleeping Beauties. These young women volunteer to become pregnant and to remain in an induced coma until they give birth. Then they die. The existence of the Sleeping Beauties highlights not only clashes of value and ideology, but also our tendency to adopt hypocritical positions in relation to notions of sacrifice and the collective interest. Jessie’s emotional journey also encompasses reflections on consumerism, global warning, male violence against women, commercially driven genetic research and, of course, eco-terrorism.

　　These are issues of tremendous urgency, not just for politicians, scientists and campaigners but for all of us. Rogers’ key concern, however, is the way women and men relate to each other: the wedges our consumer-driven society drives between ‘us’ and ‘them’ and the way power is allocated on the basis of sex and sexual identity. It is no exaggeration to suggest the way the sexes interact impacts on the way we organise ourselves, the work we do, the things we buy and the morality we adopt. For me, in addition to focussing our thinking on the abuses of science, MDS provides a metaphor for the objectification of women and the commodification of sexuality brought about, at least in part, by the cultural and aesthetic hegemony of the porn industry.

　　Few contemporary writers could tackle these issues with the forensic clarity of Jane Rogers. And, I would argue, a key factor in her ability to illuminate the themes other writers of serious literary fiction fail to explore lies in her willingness to use the tools and tropes of genre to augment her rigorous observation of the nuances of character and behaviour.

　　Which brings us to two key questions. Where should this book should be shelved？ And who should be reading it？

　　Rogers uses an sf premise to explore urgent issues with a collective impact. There’s a self-limiting tendency in mainstream literary fiction which makes it comparatively poor at reflecting the rapidly changing nature of modern life. For example, it tends to ignore the increasingly fragmented nature of our social networks and the increasingly diverse and significant threats to our survival. These are issues novelists can no longer afford to ignore, and the extrapolatory and speculative nature of sf makes it ideally suited to tackling them. Some critics will assert that Rogers’ book is literature, not sf, because of its focus on character development and the psychological make-up of an individual. But, in this respect, it fits firmly into a tradition established in the 1950s by books such as James Blish’s hard sf novel A Case of Conscience, and reinforced in the 1970s by dystopian classics such as Thomas Disch’s 334.

　　The quality of writing and subtle observation in The Testament of Jessie Lamb means it deserves to be treated as serious literary fiction. The apocalyptic central premise and the sheer inventiveness of the author’s investigation of science, society, ideology and morality should earn it a place on every sf bookshelf. This is a book that explores important ideas without sacrificing psychological depth and characterisation. Profoundly enjoyable and deeply unsettling, it opens minds and stomps on genre boundaries: Jane Rogers deserves the widest possible audience.