bisexualbookshelf's reviews
793 reviews

The Furies is a book that refuses to let you look away. Tracing the experiences of three women who turned to violence for liberation, this book is about the poison that is patriarchy & misogyny, about the femicide & sexual violence that often result from these poisons, & about the harms perpetrated against women who attempt to flip these scripts.

Flock introduces us to Brittany Smith, Angoori Dahariya, & Cicek Mustafa Zibo. Brittany is an American woman who, after surviving a sexual assault, shot & killed the perpetrator while he was attempting to strangle her brother. In recovery for substance abuse & trying to regain custody of her children, the state quickly took the opportunity to cast Brittany as the imperfect victim she was, insisting that the assault never happened & denying her the protection of self-defense laws. Angoori is the leader of a cane-wielding group of Indian women who avenge domestic violence survivors. Angoori took up this mission after being evicted from her home due to being lower-caste. Inspired by Phoolan Devi, India’s famous Bandit Queen, Angoori gathers women from neighboring communities who share her values & are willing to protect those who need it. Cicek is a Kurdish woman living in Syria who joined the Women’s Protection Unit, an all-female militia dedicated to protecting Rojava, the autonomous Kurdish region. She & her fellow women-in-arms are attempting to model Rojava on feminist principles, but spend most of their time searching for food or pushing militants away from the borders of their newfound home.

Violent women are unilaterally cast as deviant with no space made for the nuance of what led them to violence. Flock’s character studies insist on this nuance, explicating the longings, motivations, fears, & flaws of these women. Through Flock’s analysis, we see how ordinary these violent women are & how easily we could become them. I loved how, while not casting them as deviant, Flock also resists depicting these women as heroes. In the face of annihilation, violence is completely ordinary. The question then is not “How do we stop women from being violent?” but “How do we stop the world from trying to annihilate women?”

Thank you to the author and publisher for the gifted ARC 💙🌊

Clove is a woman undrowned. Honestly, so am I, and, I think, so is Chelsea, which is probably why her work resonates with me so much.

At the start of Madwoman, we meet Clove when she seems to be healed from the chaos of her childhood. Nobody in her life even knows that her childhood was traumatic. Clove has successfully reinvented herself, and she has no plans to go back. However, the world has something else in mind for Clove when she receives a letter from someone in her past that turns her carefully built facade on its head.

Madwoman first and foremost is a novel about mothergrief. Like many of us who carry mothergrief, Clove had to become a parent to herself and her mother, and Chelsea expertly illuminates the harms of that parentification. So much of Madwoman is about the pain of having to see your mother for who she really is and knowing you love her anyway. Much of Madwoman sees Clove attempting to resist this impulse, all while trying to mother herself and her two children. We see Clove attempt to determine what can replace the love she never received from her parents. We see Clove unknowingly repeat her mother's mistakes as she tries to resist them. And ultimately, we see Clove make peace with the nuance of knowing her mother as a whole person - the good and the bad.

Madwoman is also a novel about intergenerational trauma. Clove and her father are both haunted by a dark traveler who instills them with self-destructive impulses. The ways Clove attempts to reckon with the trauma rearing its head in her body is one of the most relatable depictions of Complex PTSD I have ever come across. Clove's struggles evidence how living with trauma becomes instinctual and habitual until it's wired into your nerves. The reckoning Clove faces also wonderfully depicts how trauma lives in your body and will keep happening to you until it is excavated.

And Madwoman is a beautifully pro-survivor story. Any survivor of intimate partner violence will see parts of their experience echoed in Clove. Chelsea intimately depicts the prison that abuse becomes, even after the abuser is out of your life.

Even though Clove has gotten free of her abusers, we see her attempt to control every little thing about her life. We see her struggle to accept care. We see how her world was shrunk by the abuse she suffered, to the point that she’s not even aware of her own agency. So much of Clove’s experience resonates with my own survivor narrative, and I’m so grateful to have been able to accompany her through her journey to freedom.

It’s difficult to capture what Chelsea’s work means to me. I first came to it only a few months into being voluntarily estranged from my mother. In her first book Godshot, Lacey May finds herself abandoned by her mother, but as I devoured Chelsea’s novel, I found that Lacey and I faced much of the same anger and grief about our mothers. By the end of Godshot, in a way, Lacey’s mother returns to save her from her grief. By the end of Madwoman, we see Clove, in a way, return to rescue her mother. I don’t know if I will ever return to my mother, but I know I will return to Chelsea’s work over and over again for the rest of my life, any time I need to be reminded that I’m not alone in my mothergrief. Thank you, Clove, thank you, Alma, and most importantly, thank you, Chelsea.