new book review .☘︎ ݁˖

this is a short story collection, so i'm going to write my reviews for each short story, and edit this post as i go. i might read one a day, or multiple a day depending on how much time i have, but i want to start reading daily, so this is my start at that :P

the book is called 'her body and other parties' by carmen maria machado

21/04: the husband stitch

i've never read that fairy tale (is it a fairy tale?) about the girl with the green ribbon around her neck, but it's recognizable enough for me to tell this was a retelling. and a good one, all things considering. very centered around sex, which kind of put me off, but im a bit of a puritan when it comes to my reading, so that's a matter of personal taste. as for the story itself, it's good. predictable, like most retellings are, but good.

it turned the girl with the green ribbon into a critique on the impossible greed and demands misogyny and the institution of marriage puts on married women as a whole. she gives him everything: her virginity, marriage, a child, and he even tells the doctor to give her a husband stitch after the birth (hence the title), and yet he still wants more, he wants the one thing she refuses to give him. when she finally relents (aka is coerced because she wakes up to him trying to untie it) it ends in her dying alone.

even more interesting to me, however, is that machado also adds in the extra detail of how the son percieves this dynamic. when he's first born, he has the same amount of interest in her ribbon as he does every other part of her body. it might as well by the same in his eyes. but as he grows, and is exposed to his father's demands, he learns that it is supposedly normal to demand things from the women in your life, and ignore their boundaries. so he tries to untie it. he doesn't do it successfully, and she makes a rule that he's no longer allowed to touch it, but the bond is broken all the same. it feels like, while also narrating this woman's life story & the story of her marriage, machado is also describing how the son turns from a sensitive boy into, by all definitions, a man.

edit (30/04): i read an article about this short story, and it reminded me that i completely forgot to talk about the titular husband stitch part of the story. most terrifying part of it, because it could actually happen, and does. here's the article if you would like to read it, it's really good:
What I Don’t Tell My Students About “The Husband Stitch”

22/04: inventory

this one is alright, not as good as the last one, though. basically a really long list of this woman's partners. during her adulthood, a virus starts, and at the start i thought it was covid, but i'm pretty sure it ends up being some sort of zombie thing? the ending is apocalyptic.

however, i did really like the descriptions. it was very vivid. i'm also learning that i really love this author's style. it's lyrical, but not slow. considering how bad my attention span is when reading, it's the perfect pace, especially in short stories.

29/04: mothers, especially heinous - 272 views of Law & Order:SVU, real women have bodies

i lied about reading a short story every day, hehe. easter break laziness got ahead of me, but a power outage for twelve hours put me in a reading state of mind by force, so here we are again.

mothers

honestly i couldn't even finish this one. it wasnt compelling at the start, and i'm already not a fan of motherhood and babies (which is what the story seemed to be about), so i made it about five pages before skipping to the next one. it just seemed like a story of a woman adopting a baby, and the horror took way too long for me to get interested in it :/

especially heinous (im not typing all that)

so i didnt know this when i first got the book, but this one is apparently a rewriting/short story based on special victims unit, which is a show i really like lately. honestly it borders on a fanfiction, but it doesnt stray much away from the long plot of the show, with the exception of the horror aspects. it was formatted as a list of all the episodes' synopses for the first twelve seasons, and at first this was cool, but when you're getting to season 10 and reading some 40-page long list of a story, it wears on you haha. other than that, i liked it!

the concepts she used were really interesting, and i'd love to see them developed further. machado seems to be really good at horror imagery and descriptive writing, and it makes reading this book very vivid. within this short story alone, there were a lot of ideas i liked:

ghosts of murdered girls whose bodies were never found. they dont talk, and have bells instead of eyes. fucking creepy. they haunt the female mc for most of the story

dopplegangers of the two main characters who are better than them at everything

some girl (i think she was posessed?) who could only speak in quotes from other books, and threw up seawater

the male mc's wife convinced herself she was abducted by a ufo to cope with being assaulted

again, i think another reason why i liked this one is that it isn't as sex-focused. that's the one downfall to reading a book without knowing much about it, is that i'm now realizing that is her style,, and an aspect of it i dont necessarily enjoy :P

real women have bodies

THIS ONE WAS SO GOOD! i liked it honestly around the same level as the husband stitch, maybe above it, because the horror parts were much more present. basically, there's this illness or epidemic that nobody understands, that is making women randomly start fading away and turning invisible. ghost-like, i guess, objects start passing through them, and they become more and more transparent as time goes on.

the mc works at a prom dress boutique, and falls in love with one of her coworkers, who reveals that her mother makes many of the dresses that are sold to the store. except, these dresses literally have faded women sewn into the fabric of the dress, which freaked the hell out of me when i read it. but after that, they continue seeing each other, but the protagonist has to quit her job because she's so freaked out by the faded women dresses.

the coworker girlfriend at some point gets the illness, and it's honestly kind of sad reading about them realize that she's gonna die (not even die because nobody fucking knows?) nd the mc freaks out multiple times thinking its already happened because the girlfriend left the room without mc knowing. by the end of it, the girlfriend fades away completely, and the mc breaks back into the dress store to try and rip the women out of the dresses. they dont leave.