The dystopian novel The Twenty-Third Nontraditional Love describes an inverted (homosexual) world in which mixed-sex marriages are forbidden. Conception occurs in test tubes. In lesbian families, one of the women carries the child. Gay male couples turn to surrogate mothers to bring their children to term. The Netherlands is the only country where mixed-sex marriages are permitted. In this world intimacy between the opposite sexes is rejected, world history and the classics of world literature, such as Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Dumas... even the Bible – have been falsified in order to support the ideology of the homosexual world. In this world same-sex love is a traditional love. At the heart of the novel is a love story between a man and a woman who unfortunately were born as heterosexuals in a homosexual world and they forced to hide their feelings and their sexual orientation. The novel is similar to books written by George Orwell, such as 1984.
There's so much so say about this book. I'll come back later with some more bullet points but for now here's the essentials:
This is a heterosexual dystopian novel about what it would be like if gay people acted like straight people and had the same rights.
It is a satire apparently but probably not the sharpest example of the craft.
I don't know if it's trying to be funny or not because the writing just isn't very good.
Some parts are hilarious when I'm almost certain they were not intended to be.
The narrative is super victim-y and often kind of racist. If the underlying message is that straight people are the worst, the author has succeeded in getting that across in his own confusing way.
2 stars because with a few changes and better writing it could have been onto something.