WE WERE FORBIDDEN, feminist author at her tendentious best

WE WERE FORBIDDEN
JACQUELINE HARPMAN (tr. Roz Schwartz)
Transit Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.99 ebook, available now

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Fiction For the week ending July 28, 2026

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the author of I Who Have Never Known Men comes a startling new collection of three never-before-translated stories, each plumbing the depths of that most necessary human defiance.

Wandering the forest in the wake of some unfathomable war, a woman and her fellow survivors are forbidden from leaving its boundaries or pausing in their march through its strange depths.

As part of her rigid schooling, a teenage girl is barred from questioning the dogma she is taught to believe—her punishment for doing so will be as disturbing as it is disproportionate.

Locked in a loveless marriage, a young woman satisfies her husband’s desires, twice-weekly, as directed. She has not yet thought to pursue her own.

In varying ways, and across varying worlds, each of these women are trapped. Do they have the will to escape?

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

My Review: One of the most enduring stories in Western Anglophone culture is the princess in the tower, locked away and in the absolute control of A Man/A System/An Enemy, and how she must connive to survive with whatever degree of success the cruel, cruel storyteller allows her. Now firmly grounded in the reality of being female over the millennia, along comes Author Harpman with Translator Schwartz as amanuensis, extrapolating this cultural juggernaut to include all those trapped in subservience and obedience to high-control systems.

In "The Outcast" Author Harpman uses the most familiar iteration of the story. A teenaged girl is in the intertwining coils of adolescence and sexual maturation and cultural demands for conformity. It's harrowing to see Author Harpman's keen observations of fascism turned loose on one so hugely vulnerable and malleable...it is a shorter and refocused version of the juggernaut I Who Have Never Known Men and should appeal to those seeking more of that story only dressed in a shorter, more contemporaneous skirt.

Moving into times and ties more concrete, "The Broom Closet" is a woman's struggle to find her footing in 1920s Belgium. The demands of domesticity on women are different from those made on men even now; in the deeply conservative culture of postwar Belgium, where the battles that killed millions were barely over let alone their damage repaired, they were starkly different. As one adds the inexorable advance of marriage's compromises conflicting with the absolute tyranny of the need to create stories, the trap of cultural expectations springs shut. Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own's observations made specific and played out with the intensity of "The Yellow Wallpaper."

Expanding the story logic to those enmeshed in the military of an apocalyptic future, "The Ardennes Forest" is the most immediately reminiscent in its setting to I Who Have Never Known Men while expanding scope beyond one woman's life. A group of conscripts are mapping and scouting the terrain for what they imagine, not unreasonably, to be a future battlefield. That future never comes. They continue the work they've been assigned.

Endlessly.

As the story goes into nothing deeply, it became obvious to me this is Author Harpman meditating on the tedious tasks of daily life performed under nebulous, ominous duress. There's a weirdly onanistic edge to the submission of these soldiers to their assigned task even as they begin to question what it is they're doing as nothing ever changes as a result of its self-similar patterns.

Three stories of people in a system of depersonalizing cruelty, and how that strips an individual of any sense of agency; numbing the essential "You"ness of you into submissive obedience. I'm not a bit sure it will make new Harpman fans. For one thing, there are limits to the efficacy of compactness in the involving process of storytelling. I think these three stories are on the shortest end of that effort, possibly too short for anyone not already familiar with Author Harpman's thematic hobbyhorses to fully invest in them.

Existing fans are in for a treat.

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.

FIDELTY, a Belt Revivals series story by forgotten feminist Susan Glaspell

FIDELTY
SUSAN GLASPELL (intro. Sarah Blackwood)
Belt Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$11.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A classic feminist novel originally published in 1915, and set in Iowa in the early years of the 20th century, Susan Glaspell's Fidelity is a surprising, suspenseful work about the strictures that confine women, the risks those who want to flee them take, and the opportunities that await them if they do.

Ruth Holland, bored in her conventional small town, falls in love with a married man and runs off with him, shocking the community. A decade later she returns to cold shoulders and the disapproval of the town: she is seen as "a human being who selfishly—basely—took her own happiness, leaving misery for others. She outraged society as completely as a woman could outrage it ... One who defies it ... must be shut out from it."

What Ruth decides to do next will upend most readers' expectations, as will the cryptic scenes that take place in the doctor's office after Ruth becomes involved with her married lover. Ruth Holland deserves to be placed alongside other heroines such as Emma Bovary and Lily Bart, women who wanted "an enlarged experience" and were "zestful for new things from life." Fidelity will shock and fascinate readers today as its heroine did in her day.

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

My Review: It will most certainly shock readers today, will this read; not for the same reasons and not to the same degree as the readers of 1915 were shocked. Nowadays we're watching, or y'all're watching because I sure as shootin' ain't, The Real Housewives of {Flyover Country} to get the equivalent shock value. (I sometimes long for the Hays Code when I read about the antics of these surgically altered weirdos that keep so many so entertained.) I too was shocked by Fidelity: How has Susan Glaspell disappeared from the awareness of 2026's readers?

Born on a rural Iowa homestead (this means something important, y'all follow the link) in 1876, by 1894 she was a paid journalist; she later became a college graduate (in philosophy!) at a time when the number of *men* who graduated college was a vanishingly small slice of the population; she was a staffer, full time and paid, at the Des Moines newspaper; then gave it all up...to become a bestselling novelist and short-story writer.

AFTER that, she fell in love with a married guy. He divorced whoever he was married to in order to put a ring on Susan's finger (and who can blame him?), and their union produced...more bestselling novels, as well as the Provincetown Players, Eugene O'Neill's career, several still-produced plays of her own...y'know, all the usual things a woman can expect to have happen to her when she's born into a nineteenth-century farming family. Her life as a radical socialist free-love advocate would shock and startle many in the US today, let alone then.

So Fidelity is probably more faction, or even a roman à clef if one knew the good folk of Davenport, Iowa, circa 1910 which I do not and, if this story is any guide, am delighted not to have done. I'm no small-town fancier in general, but the beady-eyed, small-minded and judgmental folk of the place evoked in this story made me panther-screechingly furious on the regular.

Equally irksome to my twenty-first century self is the lackluster critical reception of the time, doubtless symptomatic of the era's cultural unreadiness to examine its prudishness and misogyny. (I'm appalled to not these same objectively wrongheaded notions are being trumpeted as in the ascendant again. Well-timed, Belt Publishing!) I suspect some of the resistance then also stemmed from the multiple narrators whose ideas about "fidelity," that inherently coercive concept applied far more to women than men in marriage as we constitute it in the West, being rather transparently intended to counterpoint each other and reinforce the validity of protagonist Ruth's choice to elope with a married man.

Pace University Professor Sarah Blackwood's introduction alone might repay the cost of procuring the book. So much of Author Glaspell's life is footnoted in relation to the Provincetown Players' enduring legacy, despite her 1932 Pulitzer Prize for Drama meriting more than a simple "oh, by the way" footnote. Professor Blackwood makes a good case for why we should look for, and at, Susan Glaspell as a visionary life-liver and writer.

I don't really think this story of "infidelity" and sexual liberation despite its consequences will ever go out of relevance and ability to illuminate and elucidate how willful and calricious a thing the human heart is. It's more out of fashion in twenty-first century storytelling when its focus is not on the guilt and the transgression angles of attack. It might feel less minatory because there's no emphasis on punishment for the behavior, but to my mind this story is more honest about reality than modern salacious takes on the topic. There are consequences to the choices we make. They aren't always easy to endure. If you knowingly transgress your community's norms be ready to find a new community.

I think a lot of people, married or not, can relate to, resonate with, find fellowship in, that message.

WHERE THE GIRLS WERE, if you're not a worried feminist at the end of the read you didn't read carefully enough

WHERE THE GIRLS WERE
KATE SCHATZ
The Dial Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: In this electrifying and heartfelt historical coming-of-age novel, set against the tumultuous backdrop of 1960s San Francisco, a pregnant teenager reckons with womanhood and agency after being sent to a home for unwed mothers.

It’s 1968, and the future is bright for seventeen-year-old Elizabeth Phillips is called by her middle name “Baker” by everyone. She’s the valedictorian of her high school, with a place at Stanford in the fall and big dreams of becoming a journalist. But the seductive free-spirited San Francisco atmosphere seeps into her carefully-planned, strait-laced life in the form of a hippie named Wiley. At first, letting loose and letting herself fall in love for the first time feels incredible. But then, everything changes.

Pregnancy hits Baker with the force of whiplash—in the blink of an eye, she goes from good girl to fallen woman, from her family’s shining star to their embarrassing secret. Sent to a home for unwed mothers, Baker finds herself trapped in an old Victorian house packed with a group of pregnant girls who share her shame and fear. As she reckons with her changing body, lack of choice, and uncertain future, Baker finds unexpected community and empowerment among the “girls who went away.”

Where the Girls Were is a timely unearthing of a little-known moment in American history, when the sexual revolution and feminist movement collided with the limits of reproductive rights—and society's expectations of women. As Baker finds her strength and her voice, she shows us how to step into your power, even when the world is determined to keep you silent.

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

My Review: I remember my much-older sister having a friend who was sent away to "nature camp" for a few months. Is that transparent or what? It was part of the culture, though, so while there were significant looks and quiet changes of subject, it wasn't treated as stunning or weird. The Pill was very newly available in the US, though I think it wasn't legal for unmarried women in California at that time. The battles of the Second-Wave Feminists for full adulthood and, crucially for Baker's story, bodily autonomy, were still unfolding.

Baker, poor lamb, didn't come from sophisticated people who didn't approve of her accidental pregnancy but didn't freak out. I wished she'd been among my family's orbit as we were there at the relevant time. Alas. Baker's trip to the maternity "home" as it was so wrongly called is designed to cast shadows over her family's star as she falls from grace so she can still be useful to them:

They love her, they're proud of her—and they need her. And that's why no one can know what is really going on. Brilliant young Baker is their ticket, the proof to everyone that their little family has made it, will make it. The future is bright, because their daughter is bright. No one else in this family has gone to college. Baker is going to life them to a new level. This has always been the plan.

The emotional register of the entire novel is in that passage. This extraordinary, exceptional young woman isn't allowed any autonomy, any agency, afforded any support for expressing her own desires or needs. It was a different time, though, right?

How different remains to be seen.

The condescending (at best), judgmental (more usually), shame-dealing (always) hierarchy of Baker's "home" atmosphere keeps all its inmates uninformed as to their own body's workings by doctors refusing to discuss the progress of the pregnancies they're all undergoing, to discuss the realities of giving birth; of course, they're also misinformed and misled about their legal rights as a matter of course. What use instructing these girls in the illusion of legal rights when they all disappear as soon as she marries? No sense giving girls who already showed "poor judgment" by getting pregnant...clearly placing all blame on her, none on the male who was of necessity there at the time...in "rights" she might try to exercise against her husband's will.

It makes me angry even typing it. It made me panther-screechingly furious as I was reading the book. At least the abuse Baker has to endure is not physical as well as psychological. Undermining her confidence and booby-trapping her self-esteem with real, unexaggerated Hitchcockian gaslighting were not compounded by Dickensian-poorhouse deprivational cruelty. Small mercies, I suppose, loom large when the injustice of a situation is so star and so terrible.

As her due date approaches, Baker begins to use her reporting skills to keep herself sane in a place that isn't sane. She discovers there are darker patches than hers in her family's past. It's a well-handled side quest that reveals the seemingly immutable law that no surface is a real gauge of how the structure underneath is supported. It's almost always a lot more ramshackle and surprisingly at variance with appearances. A story at once familiar to me on generational axes while being at wild variance with my own privileged-male upbringing, Author Schatz's adaptation of a common story was inspired by her own mother's life story. I found the read engaging, enraging, and enlightening, as Baker brought home to me the personal and emotional realities of the absence of agency women are being forced back into.

No one with a daughter, a niece, a sister, or a mother should fail to engage with this story's emotional underpinnings. In Author Schatz's telling, the story of an unlucky young woman's odyssey through a cruel, indifferent-to-her system paying alone for a "sin" she did not commit alone, is edifying and devastating by turns. It is a must-read.

EVIL GENIUS: A Novel, look into some meanings of "genius" before leaping to conclusions

EVIL GENIUS: A Novel
CLAIRE OSHETSKY
Ecco
$14.99 ebook, preorder now for delivery on 17 February 2026

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: An exuberant novel about a young woman’s quest to carve her own path—even if she needs to step over a few dead bodies along the way

It’s 1974 and San Francisco is full of mystery and menace. Nineteen-year-old Celia Dent keeps telling herself how lucky she is to be married to Drew, a man who says he loves her. But Celia’s contentment with her little life is shattered when a woman she knows is murdered in a love tryst gone awry. What would that be like, Celia wonders, to die—or kill—for love? What would it be like to live each moment passionately and with full knowledge that each breath is bringing her closer to her final breath?

Before Celia knows it her musings about love-and-death happenings are bleeding into daily life. She’s practicing her marksmanship at a local gun range. She's searching for a love tryst of her very own. She's thinking about how good it would feel to bury something sharp inside her domineering husband’s ear. It’s all pretend, though, until the night comes when Celia finally goes too far, and she and Drew are set on a deadly collision course.

Exhilarating, surreal, and bitingly clever, Evil Genius is a comic noir about obsession and desire—and what happens when a sweetly seditious young woman dares to imagine a better life for herself.

Claire Oshetsky is also the author of the novels Poor Deer and Chouette, which was longlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE AUTHOR. THANK YOU.

My Review: I'm an Oshetsky fan. Chouette and Poor Deer (review links above) were excellent reads for a lover of storytelling that blends noir and surreal and pieces of stream-of-consciousness. I'm here for the women who, for varying reasons not least including men being obliviously privileged and uniformly clueless, don't get their feet under themselves. Identities are always under construction, never more so than when the identity is most rigidly brandished at the world. Those like "my Drew" as our PoV character, Celia, thinks of her controlling husband, are fragile masks that must constantly be reinforced...at Celia's expense in this case. It's not an uncommon trait, this...I was the raw material from which my mother's controlling abuse drew her rigidity, masked her awfulness from outsiders.

In this tale of obsession, cruelty, and how we create ourselves in response to outside pressures meeting a core of resistance, and how very much pressure that can require. Celia does not seem aware of how deep her well of rage is. Celia, under "my Drew" as lord and master, touches that rage at last...she has the example of her quite spectacularly murdered co-worker to create urgency in her feelings about "my Drew." It is a spiral up, from touching the rage and the hatred in her to dreamimg of murdering him with a nail file to the ear to taking a ride home from an attractive stranger on her commuter train to buying a weapon to taking the initiative to set up a meeting with a man she's never met but deals with on the phone a lot. It's clear the cork's popped on a lifetime of swallowed emotional abuse and neglect and victimization.

And she's only nineteen.

What keeps me Oshetskying every time I can is Celia and her half-siblings who are all Author Claire's brain children. I find new ways to enjoy off-the-beam points of view with each story she writes. Here's Celia in progress: "What Drew didn’t know is that I couldn’t be shamed that way. Not any longer...I would never again let myself be shamed by my body, or its functions, or its urges." Brava, kid! You're only nineteen and light-years ahead of most people's final destinations. It's of a piece with Celia's object of fetishization, the Barbie doll. It requires no huge leap to see how a bizarre doll...collection...stands in for the need to discover safety, and how little actual use it is. How little it takes, a few ounces of plastic molded into a distorted human shape, to buy a sham safety from the very real storms around her, these golems of industrial feminization in their legions pacifying the susceptible intentional victims with their infinite manipulability (plasticity in its original sense.).

Author Claire doesn't say this. That would be rude. Author Claire might be rowdy but she is not rude. Her ability to slit the character envelope with a rapier of witty, unsentimental observation while releasing the evil genius inside Celia to perform the real function of protection is *chef's kiss*. I've seen a few reviews that interpret the title in a more comic-book way, resembling a supervillain; I suppose that's inevitable as this is what most people are familiar with. It is, however, not at all what the story delivers, whereas I see the genius loci in every shred of this story's fabric. Follow the link above after reading Evil Genius to see if you find similar echoes.

It's a rare thing for me to say: I wish I could forget this story entirely so I could read it for the first time all over again. I want to re-meet Doggo. And Celia. (Not Sock Man, though.)

WE PRETTY PIECES OF FLESH, they left Doncaster only in body

WE PRETTY PIECES OF FLESH
COLWILL BROWN
Henry Holt and Co. (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

One of The Guardian's The best fiction of 2025 list!

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: An exuberant and ribald debut novel about three adolescent girls coming of age in a gritty post-industrial town in Yorkshire, England in the ‘90s who are as sweetly vulnerable and funny as they are cunning and tough

“Ask anyone non-Northern, they’ll only know Donny as punchline of a joke or place they changed trains once ont way to London.” But it’s also the home of Rach, Kel, and Shaz, bezzies since childhood. From scheming one another’s first kisses, to sneaking vodka (or the occasional Cointreau) into school in water bottles, to accompanying one another to Family Planning for pregnancy tests, the girls come of age together, Donny lasses through and through. Never mind that Rach is skeptical of Shaz’s bolder plots; or that Shaz, who comes from a rougher end of town, feels left behind when the others begin plotting a course to uni; or that Kel sometimes feels split in two trying to keep the peace—the girls are inseparable, their friendship as indestructible as they are. But as the girls grow up and away from each other, a long-festering secret threatens to rip the trio apart. Is their shared past enough to keep them close?

Written in a Yorkshire dialect that brings a place and its people magnificently to life, We Pretty Pieces of Flesh spans decades and continents as its heroines come of age, never shying from the ugly truths of girlhood. Like Trainspotting and Shuggie Bain, it tracks hard-edged lives and makes them sing, making one overlooked and forgotten place the very center of the world.

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

My Review: You know how much people dislike, even hate, the word "moist"? That's how I feel about the word "pungent." It's a shuddersome word, one that sounds like someone tone-deaf and with a cold is trying to hum "Born in the USA."

Yet I'm about to use it, approvingly, about the narrative voice in this novel. It's pungent, in its "sharply affecting the mind, curt and expressive" (etymonline.com) sense prevalent by 1850 about writing. When I could grow them I used to eat two or three french breakfast radishes daily because, while I don't like the word, I do like pungent things.

I liked reading this Yorkshire dialect because it got into my mind sharply, evocatively. I enjoy that kind of reading experience. It breaks the sameness, the US-standard English that makes up most reading I do, fiction or non-fiction. It reaches different places in my emotional system by "sounding" different.

You thought about them lasses ont bus, their painted faces and their bad sex facts, trying their hardest to grow intut only version of themsens they thought they wa allowed to be. Feminism had took one look at Donny and thought, Reckon I'll gi this a miss.

It's all there, it's all in that short span, and you know already if this tale is for you. It was for me so I really hope it appeals to some of y'all.

What stories we hear when we're open to listening differently, being there in a different way for what the author wants us to know. This is a braided-stories novel, one that switches tenses and PoVs to make its points and build its world. The three friends start year seven in 1998, well into the awful social Darwinism Yorkshire got chewed up by the bad economics from the successor regimes to that slime Thatcher's hatcheting of the industrial base.

Rach, a uni-directed future teacher, and Kel, the spirited escapee who moves to the US, leave Shaz behind in Donny (-caster, get it?) not entirely on purpose. As mentioned these young women tell us their stories but without reassuring you there's only one voice per narrative...possibly narrator, either, I wasn't all the way sure about that. Shaz is...she's badly damaged, she is stuck, mired in Donny because a horrible, terrible, violent thing happened to her. Moving past it feels impossible, like shifting one of the pyramids at Giza with your mind, alone. It is worse than only the trauma she suffered. It is retraumatizing because of a secret she genuinely can't share with Rach and Kel. It felt brutal to me as I read it...strong stuff indeed...but more than anything else, I was destroyed by her bitter dregs of isolation ever after.

To feel unable to speak, even to the closest friends you'll ever have, is a curse that blights a life. I speak from experience. It's possible for Shaz to speak, to heal (again I know this from experience); but it does not happen in this story.

Meeting these three after Life has happened to them was a poignant way to leave them...the fault lines still there but likewise the gravity binding them to a shared center, as they learn what adulthood has done to each of them. And of course the terrible secret is a rock forming an unclimbable obstacle; only one of them knows why, though all know it's there. I'm deeply impressed by this book and its voices; I can't quite get to a full five star rating because the nature of braided stories means things feel...hashed over, rehashed, at times and that is not a positive.

I really hope y'all who liked Shuggie Bain as much as I did will come south to Yorkshire and meet these three Donny lasses. They're good company, despite imperfections. Which, be honest, you have as much as they or I do.

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.

THE FIRST WIFE: A Tale of Polygamy, Mozambican novel of polygamy's costs by Mozambique's first published woman novelist

THE FIRST WIFE: A Tale of Polygamy
PAULINA CHIZIANE (tr. David Brookshaw)
Archipelago Books
$6.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: After twenty years of marriage, Rami discovers that her husband has been living a double—or rather, a quintuple—life. Tony, a senior police officer in Maputo, has apparently been supporting four other families for many years. Rami remains calm in the face of her husband's duplicity and plots to make an honest man out of him. After Tony is forced to marry the four other women—as well as an additional lover—according to polygamist custom, the rival lovers join together to declare their voices and demand their rights.

In this brilliantly funny and feverishly scathing critique, a major work from Mozambique's first published female novelist, Paulina Chiziane explores her country's traditional culture, its values and hypocrisy, and the subjection of women the world over.

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

My Review: Archipelago Books brought this translation of a novel by the first Mozambican woman novelist published in 2016, fourteen years after it appeared in Portuguese.

The first ever woman novelist in Mozambique had published her first fiction in 1990.

Margaret Cavendish had been dead for three hundred thirty-one years, Murasaki Shikibu for almost a thousand, when this book was brought out in Mozambique. That's just to offer but two of the woman novelists whose work a properly-run society cannot be had without. I think this makes Author Chiziane's point for her all by itself: The culture of Mozambique is deeply misogynistic.

So are all the others I know anything about.

I relished Rami's adamantine determination to redress one small-in-the-scheme-of-things balance. She demanded, and got, a just solution to a bad situation. And it worked fine.

It was also funny as hell to see her lying louse of a husband was, thanks to the rage-fueled cleverness and the strategic solidarity, of the four other women he wronged. In a culture that allows polygamy, he lied about his actions; he suffered consequences but what can make up for lying to and betraying the trust of the woman...the women...who bore your children and cared for you?

Not sure I can think of an answer at all let alone a condign one.

Like all the best tendentious stories, this one needs to be handled with either humor, Author Chiziane's choice, or murderous rage. It was obvious to me that the events of the novel are heartfelt cris-de-cœur from one herself deeply hurt by the extreme inequality of the sexes in her culture. After independence and civil wars, the ruling party had made some progress to curb legal abuses of women. As that progress eroded, Author Chiziane..."storyteller" as she refers to herself not novelist ("I am a storyteller... I take my inspiration from tales around the campfire, my first art school")...wrote this scathing, funny work of revenge fiction. In about two hundred fifty pages she takes on the system that repressed, gave hope to, then let down...again...the people it rebelled to protect.

I'm not sure how to explain the parallels I see in this woman's story and the stories of those (like me) threatened by the impending and the still nebulous rollbacks of progress in the Anglophone world. I'm not sure I should need to. I'm not sure how to convince you more powerfully that an ebook purchase of less than ten dollars will both entertain, and energize you to resist what's happening around us.

I hope I have.

BAD HANDWRITING: Stories, angry, bitter, truthtelling stories without any need to coddle you

BAD HANDWRITING: Stories
SARA MESA (tr. Katie Whittemore & Frances Riddle)
Open Letter Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.95 ebook, available now

August 2025: 40% discount on all Open Letter titles written or translated by female-identifying artists. (Discount is applied automatically at checkout on publisher's website and applies to all hardcover, paperback, and ebook editions.)

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From the author of the highly acclaimed Four by Four and Among the Hedges comes a collection of unsettling, captivating stories.

The eleven stories in this collection approach themes of childhood and adolescence, guilt and redemption, power and freedom. There are children who resist authority and experience the process of growing up with shock, and loneliness; alienated young girls whose rebellion lies under the surface—subterranean, furious and impotent; people who are tormented—or not—by regret and doubt, addicted to feelings of culpability; men who take advantage of women and adults who exercise power over children with a disturbing degree of control; kids abandoned by their parents; the suicide of the elderly and the young; lives that hide crimes—both real and imagined. Eschewing cosmopolitanism in favor of the micro-world of her characters, Mesa depicts a reality that is messy and disturbing, on even the smallest scale of an individual life, a single family.

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

My Review: Sara Mesa's collection does something exciting to me: It presents a woman's unexpurgated thoughts on her role, her world's extent, and why it is (not could or should be) that way. The women in question aren't always adults, or the PoV characters. They are always, though, the heart of the tale told.

Where men should know to go, they are clueless, or narcissistic, enough not to. All the stories together make a dark and compelling vision of our cruel world. Little hope is offered here that there is light at the end of the tunnel, even that of an oncoming freight train's headlight.

In accordance with the Prophecy, the use of the Bryce Method hereinafter applies.

The Screech Owl might refer to the bird, or the unkind and minatory older woman in charge of this forest picnic:

The snap of the pine needles breaking beneath her feet grew quieter as she drew near, strangled by the voice of the aunt, a voice from the depths of an earthen jar, deep, strong, stony. ... The aunt always knew exactly what had to be done and the proper steps to do it. ...allowing no one to disturb her ritual. She performed it deliberately, unhurried, as if time itself was obliged to mold to her pace.

Nothing good comes of wondering and wandering when your real purpose is escape. From so very much, it turns out; the screech owl least of all. Darkly suggestive of bitter secrets and unspoken unhappiness, redolent of the matriarchal control by guilt and shame, a very, very sad and betrayed start to the collection. 4*

Mármol finds us in the memories of a writer whose class is jolted by the suicide of the freckle-faced titular character at the sad age of fourteen. She recalls for us the way she felt before the event, the childish concerns and hatreds that consume all schoolkids in that passage of life; her older sister bonding with her over a particularly weird and awful teacher; the way she held her pencil, apparently so odd and unpleasant to others that they recall it decades later. Nothing much about the boy himself, unsurprisingly, since this isn't his story only one of the life that goes on after tragedy. The writer narrating the story is formed by the event and her observations set in stone because of it. Reads differently in the age of ever-increasing rate of youth suicide than it would've when written. 3.5*

Just a Few Millimeters limns some uneasy cultural attitudes towards disability as a young teacher copes awkwardly with a severely disabled teenaged boy with all his thoughts and feelings but who is trapped in his head. She is in his room to administer a school exam, as he communicates (like Hawking) via tiny eye movements.

Told in a headlong rush of listening in on her private thoughts, the story hurts in its voyeuristic honesty of prejudice, of Othering, of silent but vocalized rejection. The cruelty we all possess, express inside our heads, and so reject community, communication, simple communing with The Other. Hard subject, but when did that stop Mesa from tackling it? 4.5*

"Creamy Milk and Crunchy Chocolate" explores the shadow side of accepting responsibility for one's actions: Guilt. Not "I did this thing that hurt you, I'm sorry" guilt; the kind that, in its intensity, recenters the causer of harm, focuses all the attention on the committer of the harm thus re-robbing the harmed of centrality in their life. In other words, toxic narcissism wrapped in saintly clothes.

A man and woman come together in a guilt-issues therapy group. Their self-centeredness keeps on reinforcing their narcissism. They continue to cope, not by reaching for healing, rather with extravagant sex accompanied by religiosity and toxic outward focus to avoid the learning guilt, remorse, and regret can offer.

Subtle language point: The title of the story is in English in the original Spanish text. It carries an extra weight that way, that the quotes around it in translation approximates. 5 stars, a story that lives with me

Stonewords takes place in the past of "The Screech Owl" above. The origin story, so to speak, of the unhappiness and bitter resentment in that tale of horrors committed with "Love" in the mouth of a woman for whom it is only a word, devoid of any interiority.

A childhood, then adolescence, lived with a harpy whose grudges and jealousy masquerade as concern for her reputation (though not her feelings), leaves the narrator used to insults, belittlement, cruelty she labels "stonewords." She describes them in the same terms one would rain: as sliding down her arms, her legs, unsurprising and ordinary. The day comes to her, as it does to all of us, that all the exciting fumbling around has an end, a purpose, that does not follow rules.

Accidentally matured, she explains to her aunt the sight that brought this loss of innocence to her. The line she (which she?) never understood is finally crossed, and...offscreen, as it were...the full weight of all the stonewords lands on her (which her?). 4.25*

Nothing New foretells the death of the old, useless, addicted men who supported a system now in its rigor mortis and wrapping tightly around the few remaining pleasures of life: hatred, booze, and pointless cruelty, all horribly addictive.

The grandson recounting, sort of, the story of the old man's last hours on Earth, wasn't there wasn't even interested in it except as a story told to an anonymous audience. A bleak picture of an end that will come to so many. I hope it comes exactly this way to the old bastards in charge in 2025. 4*

White People portrays the unconsidered use of power associated with gender, as well as skin color. A young woman turns down an invitation to see her parents at Christmas so she can visit her sister, While she is there, her sister decides not to have an abortion or put her unborn baby up for adoption in spite of the pressure to do so after she is sent to prison for murder. Unmemorable, if nicely written. 3.5*

Papa is Made of Rubber tells us of three young brothers, one an infant, struggling to survive in an apartment that their parents have, for unknown reasons, abandoned. Mesa has writes about children in crisis, or simply in hard-to-fathom difficulty, and it is a strength of hers. It is a moving, unnerving piece of storytelling, but there's a missing heart of meaning. 4*

What is Going On with Us is the ugly aftermath of rape. It's told in Sara Mesa's most usual stream-of-consciousness prose.

Nothing graphic happens. I wish it had. I'd feel less...dirty...compromised...maybe revulsion for the act is cathartic. I've been this woman, and this is exactly what it felt like, still feels like, and can never be expunged from any part of you. 5*

Cattle Tyrants Short and sharp. Vivid vignette of being assaulted, being brutalized, just because They can. It's in the aftermath the tragedy unfolds. A bit like "The Screech Owl," it's more about what They will think than about what happened to you. 4*

Mustelids...those weird little critters that combine mammalian fur, reptilian sinuosity, and add a hefty dash of playful destructiveness...are her favorite animals. He's left trying to put that into the puzzle he has some pieces to, though not the ones he supposes he does. The corner piece is her published collection of violent, dark stories; then his picture's blown into new configurations as she explains how otters and incest coexist in her head, before "falling asleep" on his shoulder as they go back to their home city.

He will never know if she listened to any of the interesting facts he shared. He waits for her while she creates all kinds of embarrassing fuss and ruction looking for her left-behind otter plushie.

Clueless to the end. 4*

AT NIGHT HE LIFTS WEIGHTS: STORIES, bestselling collection translated from Korean by award-winning Janet Hong

AT NIGHT HE LIFTS WEIGHTS: STORIES
KANG YOUNG-SOOK (tr. Janet Hong)
Transit Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.50 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A disquieting vision of ecological dystopia in a collection by a major Korean writer.

An artist is plagued by desire for her mysterious double as disease spreads through an uncanny suburban landscape. An elderly woman suspects the old man who lifts weights in her neighborhood playground of being responsible for a spate of murders. While elsewhere, a woman who believes she’s been exposed to radioactive radiation inherits a warehouse where those fleeing the city can store their possessions.

Beneath the calm surface of the stories collected here, Kang Young-sook offers a disquieting vision of a society grappling with ecological catastrophe and unplaceable forms of loss.

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

My Review: It's not hard to see how this one stayed a bestseller in Korea, a country where they ousted their wannabe-dictator sitting president, yet failed to get much traction here, where the hoi polloi wished a stupid old man with a loud, grating voice and a Nixonesque "enemies list" into office. This kind of behavior used to shock us, like it did the South Koreans; when did that stop?

Nonetheless, the stories are individually crafted to keep one reading. I found it was easy to put the collection down between stories, but was always glad to pick it back up so I could reimmerse myself in a world worse than mine.

For now, anyway.

By long-established custom, we're going into the whole collection via the Bryce Method. Bless his cotton socks, this method of escaping the dead hand of shoulda-gotta on my creative juices is right up there with 'Nathan Burgoine's three-sentence review, and Nancy Pearl's Rule of Fifty.

From Mullae unsettles and disorients us, along with our psychologically fragile narrator, as the natural world undergoes a series of unexplored, barely explained disasters. Blood is the recurring visual...blood on the ground, blood on the newspapers set out to protect the floor of an apartment the narrator and her husband move into, blood permeating the air as countless pig corpses are dumped at his unspecified, but clearly horrible, workplace as the narrator peers down at it from a mound of earth that might be more pig carcasses. Women accost the narrator outside her building, forcing pamphlets on her urging resistance...to what? why? is this related to the unfolding disaster her husband begs her to remain indoors to escape? Unexplained. To say this story made me uneasy is to observe that the sun is a small, round spot in the sky. After the pandemic that killed so many people in my building, being trapped indoors while awful things happened and happened and happened...yeah, this one's sharp indeed. 4 stars

At Night He Lifts Weights gives us an elderly lady without family or purpose, living in an industrially destroyed environment, who suspects an elderly man of committing a series of horrible murders across the city. It's brutally honest about how lonely and useless people become in old age, though this silly, fluttering soul was always useless; the elderly man she suspects of crimes is, by contrast, vital, vigorous, and—ready for this?—lifts weights to stay in shape! Weird, right?

It must Mean Something, unlike the environmentally destroyed, stinking lake, the chronically backed-up toilet in her apartment (though this is handy because the plumber, a stripling of forty, is good to look at), or any of her other real problems. Like the other story I just read, it doesn't really end per se, it just has a natural place to stop. Resolution there is none. 4 stars

Radio and River Korean war survivor Oh emigrates to the US, a bleak now-ish California most likely, with a family he doesn't care about who heartily return his indifference. He starts work in some factory or another and makes a Korean friend, Kim. His inner silence is only broken with Kim, but like so many silent-cored people he surrounds himself with noise...dance music, hip hop: "Every time he heard this kind of shrieking, he felt like his corners had been filed down, so much so that he'd become a smooth lump of metal."

When a huge flood ravages the town, Oh loses his friend Kim. It snaps his last tenuous bond to his life. The road trip (and results of same) he goes on are...Lynchian, Twin Peaksy. 4*

Death Road features a suicidal woman whose childhood best buddy...a boy, against even mire powerful norms than in the US...all unknowingly and with opposite intent tells her about a Bolivian Andean road that she thinks will do nicely. That's not somewhere she can just...go, from Seoul anyway, so next up is Seoul's "Death Highway" as it's become called, an expressway interconnecting bridges, neighborhoods, etc etc. Unable to do the deed, flatten her foot on the accelerator and cause lethal havoc, she calls people from the car picking fights to work up the resolve, ending with her childhood bestie.

What a selfish and narcissistic person. Her inner and outer personas are not in harmony, which made this an effective rumination on the immense cost of misogyny, and the powerful rage of entrapped women...but nothing changes in the story (definitely the point) so it feels weak, weakening, draining without refilling. 4* for accurate reflection of womens' reality, but I never wanna read it again

Disaster Area Tour Bus follows a young Korean woman as she tours post-Katrina New Orleans. The tour bus driver's Black, and speaks in a really racist kind of dialect-Southern speech...author or translator or, most probably, both has never been to New Orleans...and, while I approve the anticapitalist disaster tourism messaging, and appreciate seeing how we look to outsiders, I couldn't get past the itchy icky sense that even your friends get it wrong sometimes. 3*

Greenland follows the life trajectory of ordinary people, no better or worse than they need to be, as they stagger unwittingly through traps, honey- and tiger-, as capitalism has its brutal way with them. Greed and selfishness and narcissism all play a role in the unraveling and redistribution of burdens...onto the women...and benefits...onto the men. Indexed to the modern history of Korea as it developed into a finance economy from a manufacturing one, the constant is that it's always a woman's thankless, unthanked job to do the work and clean up the messes. 4*

City of Anxiety is just that: full-on anxiety attacks, one after another, close third-person PoV that relentlessly charts a man's disintegration when his ex-wife disappears.

Searching for her entails a long litany of place names that mean nothing to me, innocent of all but the broadest sweeps of Korean geographical reality; it does not stop me from my apprehensive apprehension of this nameless man's unending fearful descent into a self-curated hellscape of obsessive regret. Nothing breaks him out of his narrow, bony, confining morass of unproductive, blindingly painful need.

Untrustworthy PoV, methinks, I reflected as his self-absorption drags him around without surcease. Was he the one who left the ex-wife? Did she, suffocating in his mire of inabilities, just...run? Did he kill her in a fit of emotional insanity as she tried to? It is a supremely evocative piece of writing. 4.5*

Pripyat Storage is named for the city nearest Chernobyl, of the 1986 nuclear disaster. A business the young woman narrator, turned thirty as 2006 marks her assuming of ownership and control from her newly-widowed mother, soon becomes engrossed in the minutiae of owning and running a business. It leaves her less time for obsessing over how her Chernobyl-blighted generation fails and fails and fails.

As her mother retreats into well-outfitted trips to distant mountains, she tries to reshape the storage business. As much as the indifference of her mother to the fate of the storage business annoys her, it also frees her to carve a new way to shed the unwanted garbage her father had piled up. It makes room for new people to fill this extra space, sparklingly clean from her mop and bucket, with the things they need to keep but can't bear to see in their faces.

Generational trauma making its way through the stages of grief. Deeply, sadly relatable. 4.5*

Processions proceeds from the knocking together of two empty vessels, a man and a woman who possess nothing, take nothing, give nothing, and thus find themselves attracted to the other's vacuum.

Quotidian things occur in the time they decide they will spend together; none important, none memorable, and since neither of them are those things, it is fitting they occur this way. No revelation, no great awareness shift, just two lonelinesses touching then parting. 3.5*
***

As a gestalt, this collection is less than the sum of its parts; as you'd expect from someone who has published four novels and five other collections before this one, nothing is wrong on a craft level nor is the translation somehow lacking in that hard-to-pin-down way. I'm just not full of anything now it's over. It's just...over. No fourth star for you, book.