Review: ‘Bad Feminist’ by Roxane Gay

This little blog o’ mine isn’t the only place I have been writing reviews. Recently, I started to write some for the Washington Independent Review of Books. My first one is a review of Roxane Gay’s wonderful “Bad Feminist.” The beginning of the review is posted below, and you can check out the whole thing here. 

Review: ‘An Untamed State’ by Roxane Gay

A powerful, heartbreaking book that I could not put down, Roxane Gay’s An Untamed State is not to be missed.

Gay tells the story of Mireille, a young woman who returns to Haiti with her husband and son to visit her family only to be kidnapped and tortured. The kidnappers request a ransom for her return, her father refuses and Mireille is left to the whims of her captors. She must struggle to survive when all she wants to do is not feel anymore, not think of her previous life and the fairy tale she shared with her husband and son.

An Untamed State asks: When you lose everything you are and everything you were, is it possible to find your way back to yourself?

Mireille’s story is hard to read and yet so powerful that you can’t turn away from it. An astonishing debut novel and one that is going to generate a ton of buzz in 2014.