The Doloriad by Missouri Williams. I was promised a female revenge fantasy dystopian book with interesting explorations of what a matriarchy might look like and which didn’t shy away from the depravity a post apocalyptic world may bring.

It was just depravity. It made me feel sick. Incest, no decent world building at all, characters all made me sick and were basically animals with no human thought. No delving into the workings of the post apocalyptic world.

The only reason it’s on my shelf is because I can’t bear to give it away to someone in fear they’ll think I’m a complete weirdo.

Lmao someone up the thread said they were afraid to read Meon Kampf for fear they’d hate it less than The Alchemist, which is possibly the funniest and most offensive worst review of a book I’ve ever read.

It was a movie! Starred Emma Thompson. I really liked it, it inspired me to read the book.

I didn’t like I Who Have Never Known Men. It was repetitive and weird and there was never any explanation for anything, no meaningful relationships between characters, and I’m sure there was something conveyed about gender dynamics but I never got what it was. I’m sure it was very philosophical but I didn’t get it, so I was bored.

I think they were each perfectly suited to the type of media they were presented as. There’s no way the movie could have included her reading all the diaries, but in the book it was a chilling insight into the minds of those who came before and what they discovered. And the book couldn’t have presented the beautiful scene at the end of the movie with the mirroring.

YES

Any recommendations? I LOVE rewatching the My Cousin Vinny courtroom moment but I can’t think of a book like this.

Thank you for sharing! I loved these bits:

But the more I acted the Strong Female Lead, the more I became aware of the narrow specificity of the characters’ strengths — physical prowess, linear ambition, focused rationality. Masculine modalities of power.

When we kill women in our stories, we aren’t just annihilating female gendered bodies. We are annihilating the feminine as a force wherever it resides — in women, in men, of the natural world. Because what we really mean when we say we want strong female leads is: “Give me a man but in the body of a woman I still want to see naked.”

It’s difficult for us to imagine femininity itself — empathy, vulnerability, listening — as strong. When I look at the world our stories have helped us envision and then erect, these are the very qualities that have been vanquished in favor of an overwrought masculinity.

I might have to watch the OA now.

Yeah, I hate it when a book promotes itself as a feminist legend with a ‘strong female protagonist’ and then proceeds to make her strong in the way a man is, looks down on all feminine-coded traits and presents then as weak and useless, and finally is the epitome of a desirable woman but of course hates being so. “I must wear these tight dresses for my disguise and I look amazing and sexy in them but I’m not like the other harlot women who enjoy it”.

Lightlark is a shining example of this (“a shining, yolky thing” lmao). Like you do you but DON’T promote the book as feminist-informed if it’s obviously not.

For a second, I read that as the love interest with the heart of gold was Jesus Christ.

I’m going to share this iconic 1 star goodreads review of fourth wing, you’ll definitely enjoy this more than you enjoyed the book:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5550359066