Home » Posts tagged "feminist fiction"

Book Review: The Book of X by Sarah Rose Etter

The Book of X by Sarah Rose Etter ( Bookshop.org | Amazon.com )

Two Dollar Radio, 2019

ISBN-13: 978-1937512811

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook

Cassie was born with a knot in her torso, a strange genetic mutation that has been carried on through generations of women in her family. The way she lives in and perceives her body, and the way other people react and interact with her because of her body, are also knotted together, in a way she can’t escape. Although her story is shaped by the grotesque, that is something true of most other women, too: the way they live in and perceive their bodies, and what others expect of them because of their bodies, can leave them trapped as well.

The way Cassie describes the realities of her daily life suggests that she is an unreliable narrator– her father makes money from mining from the meat quarry on their land- but what she describes– doing chores, shopping with her mother, hanging out with a friend, sitting through school– is banal. She has vivid, poetic visions of body parts: rivers of thighs, fields of throats, bodies sliced through at the torso, and her own stomach, flat instead of knotted. Her mother, who also has a knot, wants Cassie to disguise it with makeup, new clothes, and diet, feeding her rocks instead of ordinary food. Even the boy she likes doesn’t like her body because of the knot. Despite a painful experimental treatment, Cassie is unable to get rid of the knot that causes her physical and emotional pain. The meat that her father mines is bodiless, a place where she feels good about herself. But even that is taken from her when she is sexually assaulted in the meat quarry.

Cassie escapes to the city, where she can be anonymous. Even though people in the city don’t all know about her knot, they still have expectations. At her job she is expected to always be optimistic and cheerful, with a smiling face. When she takes a man back to her apartment and he sees her knot, he leaves. She is not defined by her knot in the same way that she was when everyone knew about it, but she is still trapped, this time by expectations of what a woman is supposed to appear like publicly as well as privately.

More autonomous that she used to be, she once again visits a doctor, but walks away from a supposed “new” treatment that appears identical to the one she has already gone through. Eventually she does find a doctor willing to do a complicated and painful surgery that would allow her torso to be unknotted, but it doesn’t leave her body, or her attitude, unmarked. She is still unable to endure the trauma of returning to her hometown, where she would have to see the physical pain her mother’s knot is causing her, revisit the scene of her sexual assault, and witness the “normal” existence of getting married and having a family that her best friend has. Even though the knot is no longer there, Cassie can’t see her body or self as being beautiful or worthy of love, and her self-loathing finally destroys her.

Had Etter taken a different path in telling Cassie’s story it would be bleak but not enthralling or horrific. But the surreal elements of Cassie’s environment (like the knot and the meat quarry), while very real to her, make the reader doubt the reality of the situation, coming back to the words more than once to be certain you understand. The Book of X, while giving us Cassie’s point of view of her own story, also embodies the difficult relationships and sometimes unreal feelings and perceptions that many women experience– and that is what makes it so disturbing and unforgettable. It’s no surprise that this book won the Shirley Jackson Award. Recommended.

Reader’s advisory note: Readers who enjoy the work of Carmen Maria Machado may also appreciate The Book of X.

Posted on August 16, 2020 by Kirsten, Reply

Book Review: Scarlet Odyssey (Scarlet Odyssey #1) by C.T. Rwizi

Scarlet Odyssey by C.T. Rwizi ( Amazon.com )

47North, 2020

ISBN-13: 978-1542023825

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook

C.T. Rwizi is a South African author who has drawn from African mythology and landscapes as well as more common fantasy and science fiction tropes to create a unique but recognizable epic fantasy that goes to some very dark places.

In the Red Wilds, among the people of the Yerezi Plains, gender roles are very rigid: men become warriors and hunters, and women become scholars and mystics. Salo is the exception. Before she died, his mother, a mystic, left him the tools to become a powerful mystic himself, but he has kept his talent hidden. Then his clan is attacked by a dark witch, the Maidservant, and her soldiers, killing many of his clan.

The Maidservant is compelled by a curse to serve Dark Sun, a warlord with ambitions to conquer all of the Redlands, but she has plans of her own. The Maidservant’s magic is fed by agony, blood, and hatred stemming from a similar attack on her own village in nearby Umadiland many years ago. Now she is forced to repeat the actions which drove her to revenge.

After the attack, in an effort to save what remains of his clan, Salo asks to be recognized as his clan’s mystic. When he claims his mystic power, the men of his clan feel betrayed. The queen of the Yerezi Plains decides it is too difficult for Salo to remain and sends him on a diplomatic mission to the faraway city of Yonte Saire (I received an ARC of this book and it did not have a map, which seems like a major omission for a story so geographically oriented, so I hope one was included in the final version).

The strict gender roles are also the reason Ilapra left the Yerezi Plains for nearby Umadiland. Her ability and desire to be a fighter was dismissed because she is a woman. As a paid guard and soldier, she has found herself on ethically shaky ground. Salo, traveling alone, hires her to be his guardian. The two join forces with Tuk, an atmech, part machine and part human, created in the more technologically advanced Empire of Light by a necromancer. Appearing and acting just as human as Salo and Ilapra, but with advanced abilities in language and weaponry, Tuk tells them he is traveling to discover the Redlands, which are mostly unknown in the Empire of Light.

Isa is the last member of the ruling family of the Kingdom of Yontai, the Saires, who were murdered in a bloody massacre by possessed soldiers. She has sought sanctuary in the temple while she solidifies her position and decides what her options are, as the head of the Crocodile clan has himself named prince regent. She does not know Salo is coming or that he is unaware that the political situation he’s walking into has changed.

The Enchantress is a mystic who has some kind of plan to destabilize the Kingdom of Yontai both economically and politically. It’s not totally clear what her agenda is, but she is ruthless.

The book’s storytelling alternates between these five point of view characters. A big chunk of the front end of the story involves Salo’s character development and world-building before he sets off on his journey to Yonte Saire, and the backstory of the Maidservant. It is mostly long and slow, partly because Salo, Tuk, and Ilapra are on a long, slow journey. However, Salo is being tracked by the followers of Dark Sun, including the Maidservant, who recognize that he has a unique talent and must be eliminated for Dark Sun to continue his conquest, so the story is broken up with solid action sequences involving impressive magic and considerable bloodshed. The limited technology means communication over long distances is difficult and uncommon, so the Yerezi queen, the Maidservant, and Salo and his friends don’t know what’s really going on in Yonte Saire.

Probably the most successful thing Rwizi accomplished character-wise was to give dimension to the Maidservant. It would be easy to make her a one-dimensional, evil character, but instead she is an example of what trauma can do, passed on to traumatize and victimize others who are in the same situation she was in. There is graphic violence and gore in the book- Rwizi’s black witches really are stained black.

The world building is impressive, and it’s interesting to see how the characters’ worlds widen as they travel. I think we will see this story spreading out onto a larger canvas regarding magic, technology, what constitutes civilization and power, and (possibly) climate change. I also suspect there will be a return to the Yerezi Plains as Rwizi left a number of loose ends.

Because this is a first book and the world building doesn’t have European fantasy tropes to fall back on, Scarlet Odyssey is long, but it isn’t entirely satisfying, because despite its length it ends just as the characters all finally began to come together. It feels like the story is finally picking up the pace and getting going… and then it’s done. Still, it’s a fine beginning to what looks to be an ambitious piece of African speculative fiction. Rwizi is a strong writer who does a good job establishing setting, developing characters, and creating some truly disturbing action scenes. I look forward to his next, hopefully faster-moving, volume in this series. Recommended for adult readers and older teens with strong stomachs.

Contains: large-scale murder, violence, gore, slavery.

Posted on July 8, 2020 by Kirsten, Reply

Women In Horror Month: Supernatural Tales, Hidden No More

WIHMx

Looking back at American supernatural tales of the 19th and 20th century, we can see that often the themes that they focused on revolved around women and children and the traditional roles they were expected to fill. On the surface, it may seem like that reinforces a conservative, patriarchal view of the world, but women who wrote these stories often used them to explore questions about sexuality, marriage, the domestic sphere, and the horror of confinement to the narrow expectations faced by women and girls.

Shirley Jackson’s “Afternoon in Linen”, is a textbook example of this (literally– it appears in my daughter’s language arts textbook). While it has no supernatural elements, we see a lot of tension between adult expectations of our protagonist Harriet, her own desires, and the boy there who also happens to be her classmate. In the story, Harriet’s grandmother and mother expect her to perform on the piano and recite her original poetry to visitors. Harriet does not want to either play the piano or share her personal thoughts with the visitors and insists she doesn’t know how. She can tell that the boy who arrived with the visitors, who is also a classmate, will mock her poetry to her peers. Pushed to the limit by her grandmother, Harriet claims she lied about writing the poem herself. She would rather disappoint the expectations of the adults wanting to show off her feminine talents than perform for them; and she would rather be seen as a liar than teased by her peers. Harriet’s self-determination and how the conflicting expectations of the people around her affect her behavior leave the reader unsettled, even though the story doesn’t hold the horror of The Haunting of Hill House.

It’s interesting that actually, many of the women who wrote supernatural stories are seen as “regional” or “realistic” authors, with their ghost and supernatural stories disregarded in favor of their better-known works. Edith Wharton, Sarah Orne Jewett, Kate Chopin, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, all of whom either appeared in my American lit textbook or were recommended reading, were never identified as writers of supernatural fiction there.

While supernatural tales often were written with women as the victims, sometimes they were also written with powerful women with agency in them. Women authors used the supernatural to explore anxieties about marriage, home, power, and the fragility of love and relationships. Under cover of the fantastic and unreal. they were able to strike deep into the emotional and psychological truths of women’s lives, while delivering a terrifying tale that those simply looking for entertainment could appreciate.

So many women wrote for newspapers and periodicals that have now crumbled to pieces that we may never know how many talented writers’ works were lost forever. Of those that remain, some are only available in out-of-print limited editions. Others, however, are available either free or cheap as ebooks (The Wind in the Rose-bush by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Tales of Men and Ghosts by Edith Wharton, for instance) You kind of have to know who you’re looking for to find the hidden supernatural tales that haven’t made it into textbooks or onto lists of recommended or required reading. I’ve written about some of them in the past, but there’s much to do to bring women writers of supernatural fiction to light.

Luckily, today, women don’t have to fight quite as hard to be recognized for their outstanding work in the horror genre. Today on Facebook, author Christopher Golden asked writers to name the people who had been supportive to them on their creative journey, and there were many women writers who responded, and even more who were named as mentors and friends. Of course there is still a long way to go in terms of representation, but that’s why we have Women in Horror Month– to bring attention to all the great creative women in the horror genre who make it come alive. I challenge you to pick out a book by a woman writer of horror this month that you haven’t read before, and read it. There’s so much good stuff out there that there’s really no reasonable excuse not to.

Note: This post owes much to Alfred Bendixen’s Haunted Women: The Best Supernatural Tales by American Women Writers. It is out of print but is available new and used at Amazon. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in sampling the supernatural stories of many of the women mentioned above.