Bad Feminist, by Roxane Gay. Harper Perennial, 2014

Roxane Gay, New York Times opinion writer and university professor, writes about feminism, fat acceptance, homophobia, racism, sexual violence, kink, pop culture, and a lot more in this collection of essays. She doesn’t come across as a know it all like some essayists do; she consistently admits to her own failings and prejudices. She’s funny and insightful at times; heartbreaking at others. Her own brutal gang rape at age twelve is fodder for her writing, as is 50 Shades of Grey and Twilight. The book is a mixed bag.

I have seen a lot of reviewers criticizing this book. One, for the writing not adhering to regular essay format but rather being more like blog posts. Yes, this is true. But I don’t feel that detracts from the content, and they are easy to read and digest. There is a trend among people today to glance at a more formal looking piece and think ‘tl;dr’. The other complaint I’ve seen is that a lot of them are on pop culture. I don’t see why this is a problem. Pop culture is what people are reading/watching. It’s what’s influencing people. Pop culture needs to be written and thought about. She doesn’t solve the feminist problem- she considers herself a bad feminist because she likes pink and she’s not a man-hating, angry woman. Well, I’m a bad feminist, too, despite being right out of the 1970s feminist wave. I, too, like pink, and I love makeup (I am angry, though, a lot of the time).

I loved this book. Is not only funny and thoughtful, she puts herself out there. I came across this book by happenstance, but I’m going to look for her other work now.

What Should Be Wild, by Julia Fine. HarperCollins, 2018

Little Maisie Cothay was born from her mother’s dead body. Right away (thankfully) her father discovered that the touch of her bare skin would kill- or resurrect. It could even happen repeatedly- she killed her father several times before reaching toddlerhood. She could even resurrect the long dead, which necessitated coating all the bare wood floors and trims in the house she grew up in with several coats of varnish, and making sure she only wore synthetic fiber clothing. She grew up in her mother’s decrepit Blakely family mansion in a large forest, with only her anthropologist father (who seems to see her as a long running experiment) and the housekeeper for company. Her father educated her and she read everything in the large library- being careful to wear gloves, of course. But one day the housekeeper dies, she accidently runs into the housekeeper’s nephew, and her father disappears. This is when she decides she must go on a quest to find her father.

She’s not the first girl of her mother’s family to go into the forest, which was forbidden to her. Through the years, many have gone in and not returned.  Maisie also finds herself going into the city and meeting new people for the first time. It’s a very abrupt and sudden coming of age as she explores both areas, and finds that evil can wear an attractive face.

The story is a fantasy, coming of age, fairy tale. Unlike in most fairy tales, the girl is the hero, not the princess in distress. There is a sleeping beauty, but she isn’t waiting for a prince to kiss her. It’s well written, and I liked the back stories of the Blakely women in the woods. I enjoyed the book, but I can only give it four stars; there were some problems with pacing, and something lacking in the Blakely women in the woods.     

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Magic for Unlucky Girls, by A.A. Balaskovits. SFWP, 2017

This is a book of 14 mostly reimagined fairy tales- not Disney fairy tales, but grimmer than the brothers Grimm. Think Angela Carter’s “Bloody Chamber” or Emma Donahue’s “Kissing the Witch”. These stories are feminist in a way; they explore the horrible ways in which women and girls are suppressed and abused, but they don’t always offer hope. Girls turn on other girls in one and feed off the bodies of others in another. In “Eden”, the one person with kindness in his heart is ripped apart by the women of the town.

These aren’t pretty stories at all. Most are moving, though, and there is a beauty to the prose even as it describes horrible things. It turned out to be not my cup of tea, but I think it’s very good. Four stars. 

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This did not influence my review.  

You Play the Girl: On Playboy Bunnies, Stepford Wives, Train Wrecks, & Other Mixed Messages, by Carina Chocano. Mariner, 2017

Carina Chocano is the essay writer I wish I was. She examines how pop culture treats women and girls- and how it affects us. From Katherine Hepburn and how her image had to be toned down for people to accept her movies; ‘I Dream of Jeannie’ and ‘Bewitched’ (how two insanely powerful women constantly deferred to men); to the huge Disney princess phenomena wherein a princess is someone to be saved by a man or presented to a man.  ‘Desperate Housewives’, ‘Real Housewives’, ‘Desperately Seeking Susan’, ‘Flashdance’, the misogyny in ‘Can This Marriage Be Saved’- in a women’s magazine, no less, ‘Thelma and Louise’, ‘Pretty Woman’, Disney, ‘Mad Men’ and a lot more all come under her feminist microscope. And while you can tell she’s very frustrated by the way the media presents women, she is always entertaining and easy to read. I’d love to read what she thinks about ‘Wonder Woman’ and the new Dr. Who! Five stars out of five. 

 I received this book free from the Amazon Vine program in return for an unbiased review. This in no way influenced my review.

Vinegar Girl, by Anne Tyler. Hogarth Shakespeare, 2016

In this contemporary retelling of Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew”, Kate Battista is less shrew than just someone who doesn’t quite fit into everyday society. Twenty-nine years old, she keeps house for her father and brings up her fifteen year old airhead sister, Bunny. Thrown out of college for telling a professor his description of photosynthesis was half-assed, she works as a classroom aid at a preschool, where the kids love her but the parents and teachers not so much. She is forthright with her opinions, never mean but just sort of missing the social niceties.  Her father is a typical absent minded scientist who is near to a big breakthrough on autoimmune diseases, but he has a problem: his brilliant assistant is about at the end of his work visa and will soon have to leave the country. His idea, of course, is for Kate-who he tells bluntly isn’t going to find a husband on her own anyway- to marry the assistant, Pyotr. Needless to say, this doesn’t go over well. Pyotr does his best to ingratiate himself to Kate, but English is a second language for him and despite being here for three years, American society baffles him. Like Kate, he has no filters and tells people what he thinks. Kate, Pyotr, and Dr. Battista all seem a bit Aspergean in their lack of social skills.

Thankfully, this isn’t a rom/com but an examination of men and women, social conventions, and how people are valued by others. It is light in tone but with a hard edge running under the surface. There were a few surprises, but the best one was Bunny, who turns out to be not the airhead she acts like. This was a light, enjoyable read, and I was surprised to find that Tyler not only moved the story to modern day, but changed the tale to fit modern day women. Not Tyler’s best work by far, but nice.

The above is an affiliate link. If you click through and buy something- anything- from Amazon,  they will give me a few cents. 

I received this book free from the Library Thing Early Readers program. 

Neither of these things influenced my review.