rape culture | Musings of the Monster Librarian

Book Review: Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado

Her Body and Other Parties: Stories by Carmen Maria Machado

Graywolf Press, 2017

ISBN-13: 978-1555977887

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook, audio CD

Carmen Maria Machado centers women, and especially their bodies, in this genre-bending collection of stories. Her story “The Husband Stitch”, which appears in this book, has been generating buzz (and admiration) for years. Now that I’ve read it, I can say that it deserves the attention. Framed around the urban legend “The Green Velvet Ribbon”, anyone who knows that story will predict the ending, but, narrated by the woman in the story, there is so much more inside. “Inventory” starts out as a list of one woman’s sexual experiences, but against a background story of a spreading pandemic, it starts to take on a feeling of dread and inevitability. “Mothers” is a hallucinatory story with an unreliable narrator that involves a fragmented relationship between two women that may also involve a baby. “Especially Heinous” recounts surreal, fictional summaries of episodes from 12 seasons of Law and Order: SVU. This particular story, even with supernatural elements, doppelgangers, and interpersonal drama, was far too long. I feel like in “Mothers” and “Especially Heinous”, Machado was experimenting with style, and maybe this worked for some readers, but not for me. “Difficult at Parties” about the effects of trauma and rape on the body, mind and intimate relationships, is very different from the other stories, which have a slightly surreal or fantastic feel to them. Other stories include “The Resident”, “Eight Bites”(this gets into eating disorders), and “Real Women Have Bodies”.

One thing I really loved about this book was the way Machado writes about sex. Her characters aren’t passive. They enjoy sex, sometimes paired with love and sometimes casual, both with men and women. It’s so refreshing to find this! She does a skillful and fluid job of describing sex and passion. Her writing is unapologetically feminist and queer, but her way with words is lyrical and it all flows into the story. I kind of want her to write about the early days of Mary Shelley’s love affair with Percy Shelley after reading this!

Her Body and Other Stories is an uneven collection: it has a few outstanding stories, a couple of reasonably good ones, and some I don’t feel the need to revisit. Machado does a good job at creating a sense of the uneasiness and dread that come from, and are felt by, women’s bodies, and it’s a collection well worth visiting. I’m adding “The Husband Stitch” to my list of “favorite short stories”, and this is the perfect time of year to read it. Recommended.

Contains: sex, violence, descriptions of pornography, references to rape, domestic violence, eating disorders

Book Review: Foul is Fair by Hannah Capin

Foul is Fair by Hannah Capin

Wednesday Books, 2020

ISBN-13: 978-1250239549

Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition, audiobook, audio CD

Sixteen year old Elle and her friends Jenny, Summer, and Mads, are glamorous, vicious, daughters of the ultra-rich whose parents have given them a lot of freedom, When the four girls crash a party for the lacrosse team for the elite prep school, St. Andrews, what starts out as fun becomes a lot less so as the girls are separated and most of the lacrosse team colludes in drugging and raping Elle.

But this is not the story of Elle as either a victim or a survivor. This is the story of how Elle plans to kill off every member of the lacrosse team who had any kind of involvement in orchestrating or participating in her rape, backed by her friends, or “coven”. As she looks at a photo of the St. Andrews lacrosse team, she spots one boy who was not involved, and decides she’s going to manipulate him into killing his teammates. Cutting and dyeing her hair, she transfers to St. Andrews to get close to her future victims, and especially, to get close to Mack, the player who didn’t take part, so she can convince him that knocking off his teammates is the right thing to do, and set him up as the fall guy. Even falling in love with him– and she thinks she might be falling in love with him– isn’t enough to take her mind and her heart off vengeance.

Foul and Fair takes its inspiration from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, positioning Elle’s friends as the three witches, Elle as Lady Macbeth, and Mack as Macbeth. Rather than convincing him to kill out of ambition, though, Elle convinces him he is killing out of righteousness. Elle’s murderous anger slashes through the book.

Unfortunately, the scenario of entitled, rich, white guys raping a girl at a party without having to face consequences isn’t an unrealistic one, and certainly Elle’s feelings, and the bonds of her friendships, are strong. But the likelihood of the girls getting away with tormenting and setting up the members of the lacrosse team, especially without getting caught, is something the reader really has to buy into, as is the likelihood of Elle convincing a guy she’s known less than a week to kill his best friend.

Elle is not a sympathetic character (neither is Lady Macbeth, to be fair) although we get to see a few heroic moments in flashbacks to the beginnings of the four girls’ friendships, like her defense of Mads, a trans girl, on the day Mads outed herself at school (Mads is a great character who doesn’t get enough time, and Capin writes her wonderfully). Whatever else they are, Elle and her “coven” have each other’s backs. These four girls, and the way they’re described, although poetic, reveals that they are a pretty terrifying bunch. I’m doubtful that this will appeal to boys, even though it does a pretty good job of laying out the complicity of even those who aren’t directly involved, and they’re the ones who need to see that. But readers looking for a revenge fantasy with sharp teeth won’t be disappointed. Recommended.

Contains: flashbacks to rape, sexual assault, abusive behaviors, bullying, transphobic bullying, brief depictions of suicide, substance abuse, cursing, violence, gore, murder.