Whoa. I've read several of the Bunny Girl memoirs but this is the best one yet. The writing is so poignant and beautiful, and I was really impressed by the amount of introspection Crystal Hefner has about her life. I'll admit that I used to be really judgy. I figured anyone who was a Bunny was probably a bimbo (derogatory), and I'm not proud of that. Especially after reading this books and finding out just how smart some of these women were, and how they were forced to hide it to perpetuate the male fantasy of uncomplicated, fun-loving girls.
This memoir begins prior to her life at the Mansion, talking about the trauma of losing her father to brain cancer (which I really related to-- that's how I lost my dad), losing her first serious boyfriend, and being raped. Like a lot of the other girls, she met Hugh by chance at a club and he picked her because he liked the way she looked. Like a lot of the other girls, she talks about Hefner's narcissism and the way he used his money to control his girlfriends, and how the other girls would often fight or go behind each other's backs to stay in his favor.
Most of those memoirs were written while Hefner was still alive and I did get the impression that some of them were holding back because of that, which is maybe testament to the power he held over their lives. Crystal's memoir, on the other hand, is no holds barred. She repeatedly calls him a narcissist and talks about how he would body-shame the girls in an attempt to get them to lose weight or get cosmetic surgery. Two of Harris's procedures nearly killed her and one ended up causing an autoimmune disorder (which is ironic, because in Izabella St. James's memoir, she talks about how lucky they all were that nobody in the Mansion ever had any complications from their surgery).
It gets grosser. Apparently, Hefner was paid $400,000 per episode of The Girls Next Door and Crystal got nothing. After his proposal, when the show Marrying Hef was being produced, Hefner was getting $800,000 and Crystal got $2,500 for the whole season as a sort of appearances bonus. She claims that he had peep holes in his bedroom that he used to film himself having sex, and based on some discussions she claims to have had with him in this book, it doesn't sound like the people he filmed always knew about it. When he and the girls went out together, he would encourage them to remove clothes or flash the camera and he would take pictures with a disposable camera. Crystal talks about finding the pictures and destroying them, while going through her husband's things.
I think the saddest thing, though, was at the end, when she was going through his scrapbooks and looking at the letters he received from people who liked what he was about. There was one from an 11-year-old girl who loved The Girls Next Door and told him she wanted to be a Playmate when she grew up. She sent him a picture of herself, too (in a school outfit), which he KEPT. There were also letters, she said, from boys thanking him for teaching them how to treat women.
Crystal repeatedly says that she often felt like she didn't have any value beyond her looks, and living at the Mansion only made that worse, because she was living a lifestyle where she was forced to be a prop and was constantly judged by her looks and mocked or commented on as if she didn't have any feelings. So many reviews have questioned why these women didn't just leave, but the prevailing theme in so many of these books seems to be that they didn't feel like they could-- that the ugly side of pretty privilege meant that nobody really took them seriously, so they felt like the Playboy brand was a stepping stone to something achievable, and possibly validating.
This was honestly a pretty devastating read and I felt so sad for her and the other women by the end of the book. She spills even more tea than St. James did and it is scalding and I hope she's doing well in her post-Mansion life, because it honestly sounds like she went through five different kinds of hell.
Gen Xers read FLOWERS IN THE ATTIC when they were in middle school. I read WHITE OLEANDER when I was thirteen. Should I have? Probably not, but it was one of the first literary fiction books I read outside of school, which taught me that a book can be written for literary merit and still be fun and entertaining to read. Whenever I see one of those "list a book that defines you" lists, I really want to put this one, but I feel like people will see that and be like, "Dear god, what happened to YOU" when really, it's not so much the story or the plot that I relate to (thank god) so much as the writing, the use of art as solace, and the feeling of helplessness and loneliness.
This is one of my desert island books. Every time I read it, I get something new out of it, notice something different.
WHITE OLEANDER's writing is gorgeous and the callbacks, motifs, and metaphors are incredible, even outside of the context of the story, which is also amazing. Like, this is the sort of story that I would like to write one day: big, intense, epic, beautiful, heartbreaking, powerful, EVERYTHING. I'm always shocked when I meet someone who hasn't read it. If you can get past the trigger warnings, it feels like one of those stories that everyone could talk about, even if they didn't enjoy it. It's got a flavor. You either like it or you don't.
At its core, this is the story of a girl who is the daughter of a sociopath who commits a crime, who then wanders through the foster care system, ending up in a series of terrible homes, all awful in their own way. It's also an intimate character study and coming of age tale. Astrid is a very passive character at first, and the way that she is shaped and molded by her environment and the people she comes into contact with is subtle and well done. She is such a dynamic character, even when she lacks agency.
The child abuse is so hard to read, and I don't think there's a character outside of Jude from A LITTLE LIFE who was in such desperate need of a hug. But the story is just as amazing as I remember and these characters will haunt me for life. I love this book so much.
Whoa. The next time someone asks me for a book rec of a dude who actually does a good job writing female characters, I'm sending them this. THE CLIFF HOUSE by Chris Brookmyre is fast-paced trashy fun, about a group of women who go to an isolated venue in the Hebrides for a bachelorette weekend only for someone to be murdered. But there's a twist on the usual "oh no, murder party!" plot: every single one of these ladies has a dark and glaring secret.
This book was a little silly but the characters were amazing and the tension was SO well done. There were several twists that literally had me shocked, and I admired how everything came together full circle. It's been a while since I read a book that hooked me from the beginning, and had me engaged from start to finish, but this was it.
I'll have to check out more books by this author because this one basically ticked all of my boxes. Except the smut box. But honestly, there was enough scandalous behavior in here to make up for it.
Thanks so much to my friend Corvina for buddy-reading with me!
If you loved the Barbie movie, then you need to read this book. Carol Spencer was one of the head designers of some of Barbie's most iconic outfits, having worked at the company from the 60s all the way through the 90s. Part memoir, part Barbie fashion catalogue, this book follows Spencer through her childhood and college years, into her work for Mattel. She talks about working in Asia for two years, where she partnered with people in Malaysia, Japan, and China, and also how the oil embargo of the 70s impacted the production of Barbie clothes.
A lot of these Barbies predate me, but the late 80s, early 90s ones brought back so many fond memories! I also loved how feminist and inspiring this book was. I guess Spencer was engaged to this dude who was under the impression that she would work to pay for his med school, and when she got accepted into the college of her dreams and told him that she was planning to pay for her own schooling and that he should do the same, he DUMPED her. #TakeThatManOutToTheCurb
I just loved this book so much and there's tons of amazing photographs of Barbies, some of them quite rare, most of them from the author's private collection. My eyes welled up a little when I found out that she got a Barbie of herself for her retirement, holding a little bouquet of flowers. I want a Nenia Barbie. :( It just goes to show that for all the criticism Barbie gets, she has been inspiring to so many girls and women. She certainly was for me.
Nobody does fucked up taboo subjects like Emily Maguire. She's a lit-fic author and not a particularly happy one, so don't go into her books automatically expecting a happy ending (you might not get one). That said, this might be my favorite one from her yet. FISHING FOR TIGERS is a reverse age-gap love story about a woman in her mid-thirties having an affair in Hanoi with an eighteen-year-old Vietnamese boy who is the biracial son of one of her fellow expatriates.
I thought this book was fascinating. Mischa, the heroine, is the survivor of an abusive relationship, so it makes sense kind of why she would fall for a man (a boy, really) she sees as non-threatening. When he challenges her, or triggers her, however, she has trouble dealing with him without shutting down due to her trauma, and his constant fits of pique are an uncomfortable reminder of his age.
This could have been really icky but it wasn't. Instead, I felt like it was a really insightful look into interracial relationships, age-gaps, colonialism, culture appropriation, and what it means to try to salvage pieces of yourself when a traumatic life event has left you broken.
I just finished this book and I swear my jaw is still unhinged from that twist. First and foremost, though, this book needs to have a solid page of trigger warnings because it is one of the most psychologically intense books I've picked up in a while, and the first half basically sucked my soul into a black and desolate void. DON'T pick this up if you cannot read about on-page rapes or you're feeling depressed and miserable, because this book will make you feel so much worse.
That said, it's brilliant. The first person narrative feels so raw, and Annie is a survivor in every sense of the word. While on Threads, we were talking about strong female protagonists and how some authors like to shit on weak or traumatized female characters in order to boost able-bodied and emotionally stoic women who kick butt, possess sexual agency, and mostly have their shit together. And that's all well and good, but while reading this book, I kept thinking about this comment someone left on my thread, about how sometimes survival itself is strength. And that's this book. Strength in survival.
STILL MISSING is a lot like ROOM by Emma Donoghue or Roxane Gay's UNTAMED STATE. It shows the psychic aftermath of abuse, but also has a woman regaining her sexual agency after trauma (with a pretty hot scene) and some genuinely shocking and memorable twists. I don't want to say more, because less is more going in, however I will say that there is infanticide, mentions of child sexual abuse, and also animal deaths (graphic and upsetting ones). I will definitely be checking out more from this author but I probably won't ever read this one again. I sure won't forget it, though.
I call books like these FULTs, or fucked up lady thrillers, and the requirement is basically that the female narrator hasn't got her shit together and there's a Suspicious Hot Guy (SHG) who might or might not be the villain. FULTs are the best kinds of thrillers and you absolutely cannot change my mind.
I found THE SILENT WOMAN in a Little Free Library and loved the cover and thought the summary sounded amazing. It actually sounded a lot like Freida McFadden's THE WIFE UPSTAIRS, and there are a ton of similarities, but I think this is because they're both clearly inspired by Jane Eyre. The twists and some of the core elements are different enough that they don't feel exactly the same.
If you're familiar with stories like Jane Eyre and Rebecca, you know the score. A woman marries a charming and rich man only to find out that he has baggage in the form of an ex-wife who's still kind of in the picture. I liked that Jade was a biographer and met her husband through her work. She felt fleshed out and competent and nice. Don't get me wrong, I love messy ladies, but I like nice ladies, too.
I don't want to say too much more because I don't want to spoil any of the twists, but if you enjoy books written by authors like May Cobb, Lindsay Marcott, or Emily Carpenter, you're probably going to enjoy this.
Easiest five star review I've written in a while. Has the same fun vibes as a murder mystery show, like My Life Is Murder or Midsomer Murders, but plunges into the toxic and half-rotten corruption of the British upper-class like THE SECRET HISTORY. At times, I definitely got almost-Donna Tartt vibes from this book.
Caius Beauchamp is a half-Jamaican millennial detective who just got dumped by his hot French girlfriend. In the middle of yass-ifying himself post breakup, with skincare routines and bread making, he gets put on a case for a society princess-cum-influencer who was found dead in a park, wearing a flower crown. Actually, he's the one who found her. While jogging as part of his self-improvement regimen.
As he looks into the dead woman's circle of friends, who is named Clemmie btw, Caius learns about a birthday party at McDonalds with top-shelf champagne and cocaine, an art gallery that doesn't actually seem to move much art, and a beautiful and slightly pathetic sociopath named Rupert, who was dating Clemmie but had eyes for a manic pixie dreamgirl of a woman named Nell.
Nothing in this book is as it seems and even fifty pages from the end, I wasn't totally sure what was going on. I'm surprised that the ratings for this book are so mixed because I thought it was fantastic. I am so glad that it's the first in a series because I didn't really want to let any of these characters go, even when I'd finished the book.
Oh man, I remember American Apparel. I never shopped there, though. At my high school, it was what the "slutty hipsters" wore and I did not listen to nearly enough Arcade Fire to be able to shop there. I do remember seeing the ads for the shops, though, and being like, "Huh. Awk." There's actually an opinion piece from some reputable magazine that compared their ads to softcore porn.
In STRIP TEES, Kate Flannery, an ex-spokesmodel for the company, talks about living in LA in her late teens and early twenties, working for the infamous teen clothing brand. She compares it to a cult, and I think she may be on to something, because the complicit silences and closing of ranks that happen in a toxic workplace environment really can appear similar to the mass-brainwashing of a pseudo religion.
I LOVED this book. If you told me one of my favorite memoirs of the year was going to be about a clothing brand from my childhood that I never wore, I would have lol'd. But here I am, spitting facts: this is a snapshot of a bygone era and a #MeToo story, as well as a voyeuristic insight into the rise and fall of a once-powerful company.
A moment of appreciation for this queen: she knew people were going to be swarming this memoir for tea about the porn and the hush money and used it as a platform to talk about how much she loves horses and heavy metal bands.
No, but seriously.
FULL DISCLOSURE is one book in a sea of books written by people who thought to themselves "Fuck Trump" whilst riding the Cash-In Train, but unlike some of those books, she comes across as funny, sympathetic, and likable. I'm actually shocked that this book has such low ratings-- but on the other hand, no I'm not. ...more
What does it say about me that a TV show about quaint little English villagers murdering each other is my ultimate comfort watch? Regardless of what it does-- or doesn't-- say about me, I absolutely adore Midsomer Murders. I've watched it through two Barnabys and God only knows how many sergeants, and it's never gotten old. It was so much fun to see the show evolve from wide-shot low-budget BBC drama to a rather sophisticated police procedural. And while I normally don't like police procedurals, for both personal and political reasons, the one exception I'll always make is for Daddy Barnaby. I mean, he loves to paint watercolors, enjoys gardening, and worships his hilariously bad cook of a wife, Joyce. I LOVE HIM.
When I found out that my favorite TV show of all time was based off of a book series, I bought, like, I don't know. The first four or five, all sight unseen. I figured anything that good had to come from good source material, and after reading THE KILLINGS AT BADGER'S DRIFT, I'm thinking I was totally right. Oh my gosh, what a RIDE. It starts out with two little old ladies engaged in a friendly competition to see who can find a sprouting orchid first. But then one of them Cold Comfort Farms it and spots something nasty. She doesn't know how to deal with what she saw, so she calls a trauma hotline, but before she can make like a Brit and pour the tea, someone offs her.
Daddy Barnaby enters the scene with his uptight and intolerant sergeant, Troy. The more they talk to the people of Badger's Drift, the more it starts to look like she didn't just mysteriously "fall over and die." There's a creepy mother and son duo, a suspicious trophy wife and her incompetent doctor husband, a moody artist, a May December wedding, and, of course, murder most foul. By the time you get to the end of the book, you'll be sweating secrets out of every pore, because it turns out that literally everyone in this not-so-adorable English village has something to hide. But you can't hide anything from Barnaby.
So obviously, I loved this book. I loved the episode that Anthony Horowitz adapted from this book and I loved John Nettles in it, but I loved the source material too. They did SUCH a job finding the perfect cast for these colorful descriptions, and I really loved the tongue-in-cheek wit and the picturesque descriptions of rural country life and tasty English teas. You could literally spend pages describing puddings and sandwiches to me and I would sit there and be delighted (and lest you call me a liar, I've read two of Nigel Slater's books, and both of them were exactly this). I also loved how wicked and brutal this book could be. Except for the absence of computers and cell phones, it feels very modern. Caroline Graham was clearly very forward thinking in her time. This book doesn't feel dated at all.
I don't want to say too much else because with this book, less is more going in. But it is pretty dark for a so called "cozy" mystery and I would say that if you are put off by descriptive passages about gore or abusive family/relationship dynamics, you may want to avoid this book.
AN ITALIAN AFFAIR reminded me a lot of that episode of Sex and the City where Charlotte has to explain to Carrie why sleeping with a married man doesn't make her a girl's girl. In this memoir, Laura Fraser details her two-year-long affair with a married man, a professor of aesthetics from Paris, who she meets on vacation while in Italy after a disastrous end to her own marriage. Hashtag gatekeep, gaslight, go for another girl's man.
I remember reading this in my early twenties and enjoying it then, although I was a little more judgmental of the author's choices, I think. Now, closer to the author's own age at the time she wrote this book, some of her choices make more sense. Actually, AN ITALIAN AFFAIR is a lot like how I expected EAT, PRAY, LOVE to be like (but wasn't); it's a little smutty, it's introspective, and it's also a fun travel memoir about food, culture, and romance. But there's none of the precious pseudo-spiritualism of EPL, thank god. The author knows that she is being selfish and self-indulgent. She just doesn't care. Which, paradoxically, makes it easier to tolerate.
The nameless Bob Dylan-looking Professor is not very PC and is very clearly a product of his times. He and his wife, according to him, both have an open relationship with lots of affairs, but who the hell knows if he's lying. He definitely gives off strong daddy vibes, and the whole memoir kind of feels like a Lana Del Rey song, but, like, in real life. She definitely manages to show why he's charming and also why he feels safely emotionally unavailable, too. And as someone who reads romance novels with heroes who have this sort of coding, it's kind of a rude wake-up call as to why sometimes fantasy should stay fantasy. I mean, I knew that, but still. Rude.
Regardless of whether or not you agree with the author's personal choices, she tells a fascinating story, beautifully. I'm definitely interested in reading more of her travel writing now.
I'm honestly shocked that this has such low ratings because it fulfilled the scandalous dark academia void left by Donna Tartt's SECRET HISTORY. It's a Rebecca retelling, set in a pretentious New England art gallery, with a naive ingenue who wants art that is beautiful and makes her feel things, and his horrified by the darker avant-garde tastes of her predecessor and the people she associated with.
ALENA is a decent retelling, I thought, as long as you give it proper leeway and don't expect it to be a cut and dry reenactment. I actually thought the commentary on art was even more interesting than the thriller elements. Pastan perfectly captures the snobberies of the artist, questioning when the metaphorical becomes nonsensical or just purely self-indulgent. So much of art is up to interpretation, and I thought this was a fascinating examination of the boundaries of art, and when and how beauty becomes ugliness (and vice-versa).
This is like a cross between THE SECRET HISTORY and Kathe Koja's SKIN. And since neither of those books are for everyone, I guess I can see why this book was panned by critics. The core message is ugly and it's not a particularly happy book, but the way it was told was beautiful, and I liked the unnamed narrator, too, and how desperately she wanted the world to be beautiful, and how sad she was to see her vision of her perfection shattered in the faces of the people whose respect she craved. Sometimes art is cruel.
Wow! This was a whale of a debut novel. I went through this period where I was like, OMG, I am so over literary fiction. But apparently I'm just over literary fiction that isn't about emotionally disturbed ladies unpacking their issues. POST-TRAUMATIC is a particularly good book that has just as much relationship fodder as a soap opera, but the way it parses out these relationships like a scientist studying a tiny microcosm is so fascinating, it's almost better than the drama itself. If you liked the "sad girl" subgenre of literary books that was super popular in the aughts, you're going to love POST-TRAUMATIC, because it is like the second coming.
Vivian is an Afro-Latinx woman who works at a mental health asylum as a lawyer who advocates for the patients. It's tiring work and it kind of uncomfortably reflects her own messy internal state as a survivor of sexual abuse and emotional abuse in her childhood home. As an adult, raised voices and situations that leave her feeling trapped trigger panic attacks. She has buffered herself with a good job and self-medicates with weed and alcohol, but all her bad feelings still leak out in unhealthy ways. She holds her friends to unfair standards, she uses men as a source of validation, and she seems to have a mild ED in an attempt to rigorously exert control over herself and how people see her.
POST-TRAUMATIC is not an easy read but it's a good one. The author discusses trauma, and the racial biases inherent in the mental health system, but also how feminists can have internalized misogyny, cycles of abuse, the importance of therapy, what going down a spiral can feel like and look like, how being a person of color in a system riddled with infrastructural racism can exacerbate and add to one's traumatic cognitive load, and so much more. Vivian is not always a likable character but she is an incredibly sympathetic one. It takes serious writing chops to portray a person who is struggling with mental health with nuance, without sensationalizing their illness or resorting to easy stereotypes. It is also SO darkly funny. Some authors want to be edgy but just end up being tasteless or shocking. This was genuinely edgy. It made me laugh at so many things, while asking myself, "Can I laugh at that?" Vivian does the same but she doesn't care. Because it's her life, so why not laugh? Especially if it's that or cry. I tore through this in a day, it was that good. Hopefully the author has another book up her sleeve. What a ride.
A book with a title like NSFW is practically daring you to read it, especially at work. YOLO. But NSFW is more than a book with a buzzy title; it's also an incredibly ambitious and timely novel about rape culture, and what working in Hollywood was like prior to the widespread progression of the #MeToo movement in 2017 following the Harvey Weinstein allegations.
The heroine in NSFW is never named, but she's a young Jewish girl living in Hollywood. Her mother was a feminist lawyer famous for taking on rape cases and empowering women to confront their attackers, but now she's having an existential crisis, hover parenting her adult daughter while self-medicating with expensive beauty treatments and questionably prescribed medications. She is good for one thing, though: her connections. She's old friends with a higher-up at a production studio and is able to finagle our protagonist a job.
Our heroine quickly proves herself competent and a little cut-throat. She's insecure but willing to do what needs to be done, and she knows who her allies are. Which is why it's so shocking to her when quiet whispers begin to circulate about certain men in the studio taking advantage of their power to get what they want from the women who work there. She feels valued, and respected (mostly), so surely those other women can't be right? Maybe they did something or maybe they misunderstood the situation. Those are the lies we tell ourselves to believe that we're safe. But in a culture that discourages victims from speaking out and places the burden of proof and the brunt of the blame on the wronged, nobody is ever really safe.
I LOVED this book, okay? I can't believe people aren't talking about it. Or that the ratings are so low! No, this isn't a book with a neat and tidy ending, and often it feels bleak, but the way it captures workplace culture and the so-called post-sexism culture of the early 2010s, when people felt way too optimistic about the all too grim future, is pitch-perfect. The heroine is believably flawed, and I feel like her struggle to come to terms with her own internalized misogyny and the way that she labors under her mother's mixed messages and emotional abuse are so well done. Feminism isn't a set of clear-cut principles and it's a constant journey of self-betterment, so I love seeing books that tackle the process of going through that legwork. It's also just a really good and gossipy story that's hard to put down. In some ways, it reminded me a lot of another "flawed feminist" book I just read, POST-TRAUMATIC.
P.S. The blurb says that this is a debut work, but it isn't. The author published a previous book in 2007, also set in LA. After reading this one, I may have to buy it. It's YA but it looks like it's on the more mature end of the YA spectrum.
A few years ago, this book was trending on Instagram, and as with most Insta-hyped books, I calmly made a note of it before moving on with my life. Because I am a book grump, and whenever a panel of people universally decide that something is awesome, I'm usually the one person in the room who hates it. I don't even do it on purpose! How frustrating is that? VERY.
But when this book went on sale on Amazon and I read the sample, I was instantly hooked. The story starts out with something a lot of us see clips of far too often on social media: a Black person being unfairly profiled and treated like a criminal for just going about their life. In this case, Emira has just come from a party with her friends to do some emergency babysitting for her consciously class mobile family that she works for, the Chamberlins. And some "well-meaning" white lady sees her with the Chamberlins's young daughter, Briar, and assumes that she is a kidnapper. Because of course.
Alix, the mother of Briar, is one of those girl boss type social media mogul moms, who is feminist in the way that sells t-shirts and gets brand deals. It's the pull-up-the-ladder-behind-me type of feminism, although she doesn't see it that way, because Alix is constantly rewriting her own narrative in a way that spins her as the tragic heroine or noble hero. When she hears about what happened to Emira in the store, it consumes her, and makes her obsessed with Emira and her Blackness with a fanaticism that's generally reserved for first crushes... or serial killers. Pretty soon she's looking at Emira's phone and eavesdropping on the conversations she has with her friends and nosing into her personal life. But much to both women's surprises, all this intervention unearths a connection that will shake both of their foundations to the very core.
On the surface, this feels like a Lianne Moriarty-like domestic drama that thrives in its own awkwardness and secondhand cringe. I could not put the book down because all of the characters were all so flawed in their own way, and I could see myself in little shards of their personalities. For example, like Emira, I was also working a job that I was overqualified for at one point, and worrying about being bumped from my heath insurance. It's SO stressful being the person in your social group with the "bad job" and having no one take you seriously as an adult. And like Alix, I've definitely worried about whether my efforts to be inclusive or supportive came across as shallow or performative. There are also a lot of dialogues about "helping" and what happens when help is unwanted, classism and infrastructural racism, girl boss and hustle culture, and how some (white) people use proximity to Black people as a means of establishing clout, coolness, or the moral high ground.
I really hope someone picks this up and turns it into a TV mini series. I think it would translate really well to the big screen. And even though I'm already anticipating and cringing over the future articles that would call this story "timely" and "important," both of those things are true. I came, I saw, and I cringed-- and I loved every moment of it. The Bookstagram gang was right about this one.
SILVER SPARROW is another book that made me go, "Man, can I write like this when I grow up?" The opening line hooked me right in and didn't let me go until the end of the book. Told in two POVs and set in the 80s, SILVER SPARROW is about two girls: Chaurisse and Dana. They're sisters but they don't know it, because their father is a bigamist who's married to both their moms-- at the same time.
Dana, the first narrator, is the daughter who knows. She's also the secret daughter, the one who lives in shame and has to watch her mom mooning after this man who doesn't even live with them. Her only consolation is that she's the "pretty" one, but pretty doesn't make up for not feeling loved, and as she watches Chaurisse, she becomes obsessed with this sister who doesn't know she exists, to the point where she starts finding excuses to be where she is.
You know that eventually they're going to meet, and that it's probably going to be explosive, and I think the author definitely comes to the clutch with the drama, because when the inevitable happened, I actually exclaimed aloud. As other reviewers have said, the end is a bit of a lull, but 85% of the book had me figuratively gripping the pages, waiting to see what would happen next, and I did like the ending, even though it's a quieter ending than I expected for a book like this. Also, the 1980s nostalgia is EVERYTHING. In some ways, Jones's book reminded me a lot about Jess Lourey's. I think Tayari Jones does for Georgia in the 80s what Jess Lourey does for Minnesota in the 70s.
I'd seen AN AMERICAN MARRIAGE floating around and the summary didn't interest me at all, but after reading and loving this book so much, I might have to check that one out, as well. Ms. Jones has also been writing the introductions for a lot of really great books, like Delores's Phillips's THE DARKEST CHILD, Ann Perry's THE STREET, and Alice Walker's MERIDIAN. With THE DARKEST CHILD, I could definitely see the influences that book may have had on this work, so if you, like me, end up falling in love with this author and end up needing more, more, more, check out those three aforementioned books, as well.
Wow, if this isn't made into a Netflix miniseries soon, somebody's sleeping at their desk. This had everything I love in fiction-- a strong and flawed female protagonist, a dark storyline, breakneck pacing, and even a little romance. I'm keeping AN UNTAMED STATE on my Kindle forever as a reminder of what good writing looks like, because whoa. My feelings have been put into a blender and thoroughly shaken.
AN UNTAMED STATE is about the daughter of one of Haiti's wealthiest businessmen. She is a lawyer and a success in her own right, married to a white man who is the son of farmers. Once, she helped take care of his mother while she was recovering from cancer. His mother was an ignorant and proud woman, but her brush with death and her love of her son made her love Mireille too. Now, she and her new baby and her husband are in Haiti, and she is slowly getting her husband to love the country she has been taught to love.
And then she gets kidnapped.
And her father refuses to pay the price the men who have taken her are asking.
The story is told in two parts: during and after. One is a traditional thriller story of survival and bravery. The other is a story of healing and recovery. Mireille and her husband, Michael, are the narrators. I don't want to say too much more because of spoilers, but the things that Mireille endures at the hands of her captors is brutal. It reminded me a lot of the dark erotica, BREAK HER. Through torture, Mireille learns a lot about her own ability to survive and endure. She is reduced to an untamed state, which could also refer to Haiti itself: a place of beauty that, in her privilege, she has always glimpsed through rose-tinted glasses, unable to see the poverty and the desperation that can make mortal men so cruelly desperate.
This book has triggers for virtually everything but it is so deftly handled and such a starkly brilliant portrayal of humanity at its best and worst that nothing felt sensational. I love Gay's nonfiction and felt only lukewarm about her fictional short story collection that I read, but this book was absolutely masterful. I seriously can't even find the words to explain how much I loved this and why, but I know it's probably going to end up being one of my favorite books of the year. It's that good.
Nenia ✨ I yeet my books back and forth ✨
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