HENRY TUDOR MUST DIE, feminist historical revenge fantasy about a notable femicidal maniac

HENRY TUDOR MUST DIE
JILLIAN LAINE
Berkley Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: One queen exiled. Another headed for the gallows. Both hungry for revenge. England’s most infamous queens set out to reclaim their story and unite in vengeance against Henry VIII.

Anne Boleyn is going to die, and neither her cleverness nor her witchery can save her. So when her late rival, Catalina de Aragón, miraculously appears in her cell at the Tower of London on the eve of her execution, very much alive and offering a daring escape plan, no one is more surprised than Anne.

Lina doesn’t have Anne’s magic—but she has just as much hate for England’s wretched king. Severed from her daughter and stripped of all her influence, Lina breathes only for the Hellebore Sisterhood, a clandestine and powerful society with a vested interest in keeping both queens alive…and using their particular skills to advance womankind.

Anne and Lina’s old rivalries pale in comparison to a common enemy. One by one, they capture their pawns, infiltrating the court, recruiting the new queens in Henry’s orbit, and eliminating the men who plotted against them. Always inching closer to their true target…

And they want his head.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: What if the serial-killing society-wrecking lying scumbag H8 had been telling the truth (for once) when he accused Anne Boleyn of being a witch? What if the recently-deceased rightful queen,here called by her proper name Catalina de Aragón, shows up in Anne's cell before her murder as a representative of the Hellebore Sisterhood, a supernatural group determined not to put up with H8's shenanigans against women?

As a fantasia, the musical composition sense applied to fiction, on the awful facts of Tudor England, it struck many a satisfying note. (My biggest quibble is with lesbian Anna of Cleves. It feels silly, but good lord I'm not quibbling about a months-dead Catholic lady from religious-nut Spanish parentage appearing in her adulterous replacement's cell to rescue her from her judicial murder so never bloody mind about that I guess.) H8's reign is one I'm always interested to read disruptions and alterations of because he was such a pill. Because his greed, his arrogance, his utter self-regarding solipsism was so hugely consequential in all the worst ways on England's social fabric that it always makes me smile in schadenfreudic glee when a writer unleashes hell on him.

Unleashing hell is a plan for the Queens in this revenge fantasy. I don't think another ragefest of this type would necessarily fly, or at least it wouldn't with me, absent such a horrific target for the Queens' H8rade punch. It gets pretty, uhhhmmm, vivid so it won't leave you in any doubt about why the subject of their (out)rage is chosen, and thus leading you to who the Hellebore Sisterhood might be. It's a topic I'd love to discuss but one huge spoiler tag might cover it but will also drive potential readers away. I'm here for more Hellebore Sisterhood stories if you choose to write them, Author Jillian.

And that coming from a man, who is not a massive fantasy-readin' lover of the tropes, ought to say a lot. I think as alternate-history stories about these Queens they're no great shakes, failing the believability test at literally every turn; they're not meant to be alternate-history stories but fantasies set in an alternate universe where there are other rules for physics. None of this is going to convince wedded-to-consensus-reality reader to drop their filters, so my purpose is to warn those folks to shop elsewhere. None of this story will work for you.

Author Jillian's debut adult novel is a delight if you'll let go of the slavish adherence to plausibility rules about history retellings. It's easier to write straightforward fantasy where one invents a secondary world with all-new names and no stroppy literalists who Have Opinions about bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated Reality. I myownself greatly prefer Author Jillian's way of engaging with one of History's most fascinating inflection points.

What explains my missing half-star is a certain lesbian. That really did feel like I'd been asked to go a bridge too far. I'm an old grouch, I get to have crotchets just because. I want to draw your attention to the remaining four and a half shiny stars to have my reputation as a discerning judge of quality entertainment validated.

MEDEA SANG ME A CORRIDO, latest feminist redemption of a Classical-mythology woman's character

MEDEA SANG ME A CORRIDO
DAHLIA DE LA CERDA (tr. Heather Cleary & Julia Sanches)
The Feminist Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A punk revival of Medea as a Mexican anti-angel of birth and death, from the International Booker Prize–nominated author of Reservoir Bitches

In Northern Mexico, Paulina, Perla, Antonia, Reina, and Jordan are striving to survive the barrio—hustling on the edge of a cartel-run economy, nursing the wounds made normal in a world that eats its own. Hovering over their trials is a spirit with gothic flair, dressed in black and crowned with braids: Medea, a mythic mother of the Chihuahuan desert, ancient as the Aztecs but never too old to be petty.

From aiding a trophy girlfriend’s abortion, to accompanying a mother in her search for her lost child in the desert, to embracing those taken too soon in the narco’s brutal proxy wars, Medea fights for justice for her chosen mortals—her divine wrath the only power that could rival the corrupt, violent web spun by the cartel, the government, and the military. Dahlia de la Cerda’s magnetic prose draws readers right into the heart of that web—and links all our fates to the missions of Medea, equal parts midwife and gravedigger, a femme fatale god in a femicidal world.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Repurposing classical myths for the twenty-first century is a...subgenre? full genre? literary storytelling technique?...an effort I enjoy a great deal. Medea repurposed as avenging goddess, destroying angel, wrathful righter of women's victimization, has double appeal for me. It corrects what I've always seen as the calumniation of a powerful healer-semidivinity with the accusation of insane jealousy over a man who has abandoned her for another woman. She is accused in classical sources of murdering her children, born of her body, to exact revenge on a faithless fucker she literally enabled, by using her skills and knowledge, to come to power and riches.

A healer-spirit so skilled she is regarded as divine.

Male anxiety much, Euripides?

So I've never found the famous version of Medea at all convincing. It smacks of an attempt to invalidate a powerful and skilled woman by making her hyperfocused on a man; by accusing a mother of murdering her children born of her body because a man hurt her feelings by betraying her with another woman.

Hogwash.

No better mythological figure, then, to be repurposed into a guardian of women in a seriously patriarchal, femicidal culture like that of the narcotraficantes. Setting these interconnected stories...more like very well-defined chapters than actual stories, what I myownself have always referred to as "braided stories" because, like a braid, the separate strands are evident while making together a whole effect not possible for the strands separately (see Celeste Mohammed's works)...in what she calls "Aztlán," the narcostate existing in Northern Mexico where femicide is appallingly rampant offers Author Dahlia wide scope for Medea's redemption. As an avenger, Medea appears here with clear markers of supernatural power: "Then she kissed me on the forehead and shot through the sky in a snake-drawn carriage," is not a description of an everyday person. Six women in dire trouble are visited and assisted by Medea in barely over a hundred pages.

None of them are spotless, sweet little fembots, which is a relief. Messy, horny, misguided people are innumerable across the globe and occur in every ray of the rainbow of identities humans so love to pretend are Ordained and Immutable. Medea ignores these ideologically driven cultural fripperies to effect redress for the wronged.

It's satisfying to me because I like Ma'at being served by Justice (very different in my observation from mere "justice" such as the travesty being perpetrated by the US government department using that name). Medea, in Author Dahlia's hands, serves and renders Justice even in the face of "justice."

I have only one critique to offer in support of my just-off-perfect rating of the work: sometimes speed is not your friend when offering tendentious and muckraking narratives. I felt, by the end of the read, I was not in possession of enough facets of each woman's life experience to grasp the motivation for Medea coming to the rescue. It's not necessary for the story of Medea as avenger to be formed and shaped. That is done, and the shape is one I found enrichingly sharp. I was not utterly enthralled where that was *easily* within Author Dahlia's reach.

It's a braid of great beauty. It stops short of Divine Grace. And it is so urgently necessary for all of us to get our heads around the reason it exists I'm here pushing it at you. Please pick one up soonest.

THE SIMPLE ART OF KILLING A WOMAN, brutally honest recounting of the reality of femicide

THE SIMPLE ART OF KILLING A WOMAN
PATRÍCIA MELO (tr. Sophie Lewis)
Restless Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From best-selling Brazilian crime novelist Patrícia Melo comes a genre-defying tale of women in the Amazon and their reckoning with brutal oppression

By turns poetic, humorous, dark, and inspiring. The Simple Art of Killing a Woman vividly conjures the epidemic of femicide in Brazil, the power women can hold in the face of overwhelming male violence, the resilience of community despite state-sponsored degradation, and the potential of the jungle to save us all.

To escape her newly aggressive lover, a young lawyer accepts an assignment in the Amazonian border town of Cruzeiro do Sul. There, she meets Carla, a local prosecutor, and Marcos, the son of an indigenous woman, and learns about the rampant attacks on the region’s women, which have grown so commonplace that the cases quickly fill her large notebook. What she finds in the jungle is not only persistent racism, patriarchy, and deforestation, but a deep longing for answers to her enigmatic past. Through the ritual use of ayahuasca, she meets a chorus of Icamiabas, warrior women bent on vengeance―and gradually, she recovers the details of her own mother’s early death.

The Simple Art of Killing a Woman resists categorization: it is a series of prose poems lamenting the real-life women murdered by so many men in Brazil; a personal search for history, truth, and belonging; and a modern, exacting, and sometimes fantastical take on very old problems that, despite our better selves, dog us the world over.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: You know a book has said something profound, moving, and honest when more about fifteen hundred Goodreads reviews are very positive to four hundred profoundly negative. Goodreads ain't the Land of Woke, yet four times as many people chose to express a positive opinion of this story of violence and murder against women as bothered to bash it.

I'm praising it, too. The way Author Melo weaves magical, intensely sensual words...

Death has been kind to me, I thought. I haven't been run over by a lorry. I haven't fallen to a stray bullet. I have not been hastened toward death—rather, death has only dreamed of me; it has only knocked at my door. Tap, tap, tap. "I'm thinking of coming for you tonight at nightfall," death had said.
–and–
It seemed to be raising a piece of me that had been forgotten, something stifled inside me, a piece that on coming free levered up another, and so on and so on, down to the last lost piece, the furthest fallen, as good as buried—the one called "mother."

...into lovely images as well as wields word-scalpels as she detachedly discusses the murder of women simply for being (or presenting as) women is brutal and effective in conveying the sickness at the heart of femicide.

You never imagine that a guy like this, a Wittgenstein reader and yoga fan, will hit you in the face at a lawyers’ New Year’s Eve party. But the statistics show that it happens a lot. And that lots of men don’t stop at a slap. They’d actually rather kill you.
–and–
The conclusion I reached by my second week in court was this: we women are dying like flies. You men get hammered and kill us. Men want to fuck and kill us. Men get enraged and kill us. Men want a bit of fun and kill us. Men discover our lovers and kill us. We leave them and men kill us. Men get another lover and kill us. Men come home tired after work and kill us.

It is as Author Melo has Carla say: "It doesn't matter where you are or what social class you belong to and it doesn't matter what you do for a living. It's dangerous being a woman."

From many directions, for reasons and for no reason at all, it is dangerous to be a woman.

That simple, statistically verifiable truth is really all the impetus I think you should need to get and read this book.

I couldn't offer a fifth star, as the subject matter alone merited, because the reading experience was not well-integrated; the tonal shifts were effective but were also overused. The characters aren't really developed because there is so very much to say about the reason we-the-reader are here; but that means, at times, we-the-reader don't get the real horror-movie-esque impact only the documentary, evidentiary disgust and outrage.

A story to admire, to absorb and retain lessons from; not one to follow your spouse or equivalent around, reading bits and snatches to.

RESERVOIR BITCHES: Stories, outrage...rage...there's more in here than meets the eye

RESERVOIR BITCHES: Stories
DAHLIA DE LA CERDA (tr. Julia Sanches & Heather Cleary)
The Feminist Press at CUNY
$16.95 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: LONGLISTED for the 2025 International Booker Prize

A debut collection of gritty, streetwise, and wickedly funny stories about Mexican women who fight, skirt, cheat, cry, kill, and lie their way to survival.

“Life’s a bitch. That’s why you gotta rattle her cage, even if she’s foaming at the mouth.” In the linked stories of Reservoir Bitches, thirteen Mexican women prod the bitch that is Life and become her. From the all-powerful daughter of a cartel boss to the victim of transfemicide, from a houseful of spinster seamstresses to a socialite who supports her politician husband by faking Indigenous roots, these women spit on their own reduction and invent new ways to endure, telling their own stories in bold, unapologetic voices. At once a work of black humor and social critique, Reservoir Bitches is a raucous debut from one of Mexico’s most thrilling new writers.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: If and/or when (honestly I'm all but certain it won't happen) the mooted TV series, via Amazon Prime and Spanish-language producers Perro Azul, arrives I will be *amazed* if even a third of rage and fury in these stories make it onto the screen. Since the Feminist Press mentioned this possibility when the book was first published in September 2024, nothing else has appeared on Amazon, The Hollywood Reporter, or even Perro Azul's Spanish-language websites. I expect it's a dead deal...given the truly hair-raising stuff in here, I'd be far more surprised if any production efforts were ever made. This is strong stuff. The *men* in charge of any budgets will not approve this one!

As is reasonable and customary in these parts, these thirteen stories will be dealt with by using the time-honored Bryce Method.

Parsley and Coca Cola details an at-home self-induced effort at aborting an unwanted child..."Yup, I got knocked up by a terrible lay," she says directly to us, recounting this latest blow from Clotho's shuttle as her life of bad luck...no visible dad, dead mom, now this...takes its own ugly pattern. A lucky break...an older woman who clearly knows the score...means a day or so of nasty pain, some passing of clots, and finally confirmed success.

Not for the squeamish, but I can vouch for its accuracy. 4*

Yuliana brutalizes our eyes with the inner monologue of a drug capo's heiress, the toughest of his children. "We women always speak, think, and act from the memory of our pain," she says to us as she recounts her revenge on the man who killed her high-school bestie via her new, um, protegée's well-honed skills as an angel of vengeance against men who abuse women.

The female of the species, fam. 4.5*

God Forgive Us, a cri de cœur, emitted by an old mestiza spinster who's spent her whole life caring for...and about...her duty, her reputation, after she and another sister murder a girl.

The girl was a machete-wielding robber, so it was self-defense. No legal problems ensue. But how terrible her guilt, how bitter the social dregs! She killed a girl! Because she and her sister thought the violent invader of their home was a boy.

But it was a girl! Her poor mother! 4*

Constanza proves that, when you have no center, nothing is ever going to hold you back. Unsettling. I felt...outrage, anger, contempt, quietly and at myself for how easily I saw her point and how terribly easily snuffing out a life could become a routine matter. It was a wake-up call for the snotty little moralizer inside to see the emotional rightness of tit-for-tat. 4 unsettled stars, and an extra session in therapy requested

God Didn't Come Through like she ever does, mijo. This is the other side of "God Forgive Us," in case you want to practice your lip-pursing action. First mention in the collection, to my surprise, of Santa Muerte...and I now twig to the fact I haven't mentioned the untranslated Spanish yet!

Words here and there are dropped without full context but with plenty of cues, so you're never left at sea. Offshore in a sturdy dinghy, yes; but always in sight of the land that meaning provides. 4.5*

La China takes us inside "Yuliana"'s murder plans, and an account of the action that, while revolting, was not prurient or distastefully lingering.

I'm a little unnerved that it's so easy to put myself into the headspace of these outsiders, to see there's a real "why" behind the awful whats they're doing. I'll need another extra therapy session soon. 4*

The Rose of Sharon is so short it barely counts a percentage point in the read. It is every goddamned thing I despise about religion in one caustic, awful vignette. I still see its vileness in front of my eyes...

Vomit trickled from his mouth, smelling of liquor. I dropped to the floor with tears in my eyes and prayed he would choke. "Dear Lord, let the walls of Jericho fall before my eyes, throw off my shackles and drag this man to the gates of Hell. Give me victory over my enemy, knock down the walls of my prison and the fortresses that cast down my heart."

So very godly, no?

This is not the end, or the ending. Suffice to say myths enacted are always enacted for evil. 4*

Regina is the deets behind "Yuliana"'s inciting incident. Not memorable, feels...hmmm...like a makeweight, a tossed-on bread roll to get the scale where it needs to be.

Plus, it's ever-so precious. 3*

Mariposa de Barrio is what happens when life's a lemon grove, the lemonade's for the owner, all you're gonna get is the empty, fleshless rinds...boil up some sugar and candy that peel, mija! Never mind how much it costs. Bills can get paid all kinda ways, but all of 'em Later. 3.5*

The Smile makes the femicides on La Frontera deeply personal. Somehow even the appalling facts do not feel prurient, since they're not lingered over; I like to think this actually happened, the ending I mean, at least once. 4*

Sequins "Masculinity is like marzipan: fragile as hell, queen," says our transfem narrator. Let me tell you, seeing that observation in a defector from The Boys was a bitch-slap like no other. Then, the price for laughter: murder, femicide again, only this time the details are there. It's brutal to read but what human could do that, all that, to a living person?

An evil one, the evil ones are the killers not ever their victims. Blood does wash away "sins"—the victim's. 4.5*

Playing with Fire is the funniest story here, among some weirdly funny, but not nice, stuff. This one is rip-your-shorts laughing fun.

Professional courtesy is not just between lawyers. 5*

La Huesera, last in line, is more novelette than story.

Fucking brutal. Horrifying. Enraging. La Huesera adressed de profundis:

Even if only part of your ashes...are under my bed, the way I see it, your bones have been gathered. I hope someday I'll get to hear you howling in the night.

Saving the best for last, Author de la Cerda. 5*