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3.61 AVERAGE
3.61 AVERAGE
adventurous
dark
emotional
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I will be thinking of this one for years. I will recommend it to anyone I know who has or needs a Nightbitch attitude. Do yourself a favor and take this to heart (well maybe not the animal cruelty or traumatizing your children, but the feminist agenda ❤️)
challenging
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
dark
funny
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I definitely thoroughly enjoyed this book (even though it repulsed me). However, the pacing was off. Very repetitive. The book would maybe benefit from having been a novella. Love the commentary on motherhood; truly beautiful.
dark
mysterious
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Wow. This book made me so angry. Nightbitch is, on its surface, about a woman who turns into a dog to escape the crushing confines of motherhood. It’s not a condemnation of mothers but a celebration of the “brutality and power and darkness of motherhood.”
Yoder is so skilled at telling the story of a mother who loves her son and husband, who willingly gave up a promising career as an artist to stay at home while her husband works.
But this mother is exhausted, ya’ll. Her son is demanding, her husband is loving but useless and unappreciative, and her working mom friends seem to have the best of both worlds. Her stay-at-home mom anxiety leaves her creatively unfulfilled and perpetually tired. She sees her time and potential slipping away.
The mundanity of her routine and the demands of motherhood create a pressure cooker environment. I had to cheer when she just fucking unleashed and like, ate a rabbit and pissed on the lawn. Her transformation into Nightbitch is whimsical and hilarious and upsetting.
The husband made me want to SCREAM. He is the pinnacle of fathers who feel like kings for doing the bare minimum as a parent. At the end of the book his big moment of growth is agreeing to put the kid to bed on weekends. Bar on the fucking ground!
“He worked all week, and she felt it was too much to ask him to lift a finger on the weekend, because she had automatically devalued her work from the start. She had been, she saw now, inculcated by a culture that told her, Look, it’s cute that you’re a mom, and go do your thing, but, honestly, it’s not that hard; you’re probably not all that smart or interesting, but good for your for feeling fulfilled by mothering.”
The pressures and expectations of motherhood, the disappointment and loss of self, the buried dreams of mothers, female rage — all of it is in here and it’s both infuriating and cathartic.
“How may generations of women had delayed their greatness only to have time extinguish it completely? How many women had run out of time while the men didn’t know what to do with theirs? And what a mean trick to call such things holy or selfless. How evil to praise women for giving up each and every dream.”
I feel like both mothers and women who don’t want to become mothers (or have yet to become mothers) will feel seen and validated by this book.
Nightbitch is feral, bloody and bloody good.
(Review based on ARC).
Yoder is so skilled at telling the story of a mother who loves her son and husband, who willingly gave up a promising career as an artist to stay at home while her husband works.
But this mother is exhausted, ya’ll. Her son is demanding, her husband is loving but useless and unappreciative, and her working mom friends seem to have the best of both worlds. Her stay-at-home mom anxiety leaves her creatively unfulfilled and perpetually tired. She sees her time and potential slipping away.
The mundanity of her routine and the demands of motherhood create a pressure cooker environment. I had to cheer when she just fucking unleashed and like, ate a rabbit and pissed on the lawn. Her transformation into Nightbitch is whimsical and hilarious and upsetting.
The husband made me want to SCREAM. He is the pinnacle of fathers who feel like kings for doing the bare minimum as a parent. At the end of the book his big moment of growth is agreeing to put the kid to bed on weekends. Bar on the fucking ground!
“He worked all week, and she felt it was too much to ask him to lift a finger on the weekend, because she had automatically devalued her work from the start. She had been, she saw now, inculcated by a culture that told her, Look, it’s cute that you’re a mom, and go do your thing, but, honestly, it’s not that hard; you’re probably not all that smart or interesting, but good for your for feeling fulfilled by mothering.”
The pressures and expectations of motherhood, the disappointment and loss of self, the buried dreams of mothers, female rage — all of it is in here and it’s both infuriating and cathartic.
“How may generations of women had delayed their greatness only to have time extinguish it completely? How many women had run out of time while the men didn’t know what to do with theirs? And what a mean trick to call such things holy or selfless. How evil to praise women for giving up each and every dream.”
I feel like both mothers and women who don’t want to become mothers (or have yet to become mothers) will feel seen and validated by this book.
Nightbitch is feral, bloody and bloody good.
(Review based on ARC).
emotional
funny
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
this novel explores ideas surrounding motherhood, womanhood, female rage, marriage, gender roles, and feminism. the narrator is not named but known as “the mother” throughout the entire novel. this is intentionally used to highlight the idea that your indentity is lost once you become a mother. a mother so often becomes all you are viewed as rather than a whole human being and is how many mothers often feel themselves. that being the case with this narrator. shortly after giving birth the narrator believes that she is turning into a dog/wolf more and more everyday as she is slowly losing her identity. she calls this version of herself “nightbitch”. this uses the metaphor of motherhood being a beast that consumes you and changes you from the inside out. she quit her job and essentially her life to be a mother. as she consistently feels unappreciated by her husband, alone, and longs for the woman she used to be before motherhood, nightbitch takes over her.
“how many generations of women had delayed their greatness only to have time extinguish it completely? how many women had run out of time while the men didn’t know what to do with theirs? and what a mean trick to call such things holy or selfless. how evil to praise women for giving up each and every dream”
“the child is removed, and our organs are taken out as well, before being sewn back inside. it is perhaps the most violent experience a human can have aside from death itself. and this performance is meant to underscore the brutality and power and darkness of motherhood, for modern motherhood has been neutured and sanitized. we are at base animals, and to deny us either our animal nature or our dignity as humans is a crime against existence. womanhood and motherhood are perhaps the most potent forces in human society, which of course men have been hasty to quash, for they are right to fear these forces”
“silence. she turned her eyes to the mothers, blood smeared over her face, her cheeks and chin, her eyes alight with what? with madness? power? ecstatic knowing? feral femininity?”
“did she really have no desires anymore? no deep passions? where has the vitriolic emotions and sweeping gestures of her twenties disappeared to?”
“no, no one needed her but a two year old. she could do whatever she wanted- except for crying, which she would do in limited increments while pretending to use the bathroom”
“i am angry all the time, i would one day like to direct my own artwork toward a critique of these modern day systems that articulates all this, but my brain no longer functions as it did before the baby, and i am really dumb now. i am afraid i will never be smart or happy or thin again. i am afraid i might be turning into a dog. instead, she said, smiling, i love it. i love being a mom”
“that single white hot light at the center of the darkness of herself that was the point of origin from which she birthed something new, from which all women do. you light a fire in early girlhood. you stroke it and tend it. you protect it at all costs. you don’t let it rage into a mountain of light, because that’s not the becoming of a girl. you keep it secret. you let it burn. you look into the eyes of other girls and see their fires flickering there, offer conspiratal nods, never speak aloud a near unbearable heat, a growing conflagration. you tend the flame because if you don’t you’re stuck, in the cold, on your own, doomed to seasonal layers, doomed to practicality, doomed to this is just the way things are, doomed to settling and understanding and reasoning and agreeing and seeing it another way and seeing it his way and seeing it from all the other ways but your own”
“how many generations of women had delayed their greatness only to have time extinguish it completely? how many women had run out of time while the men didn’t know what to do with theirs? and what a mean trick to call such things holy or selfless. how evil to praise women for giving up each and every dream”
“the child is removed, and our organs are taken out as well, before being sewn back inside. it is perhaps the most violent experience a human can have aside from death itself. and this performance is meant to underscore the brutality and power and darkness of motherhood, for modern motherhood has been neutured and sanitized. we are at base animals, and to deny us either our animal nature or our dignity as humans is a crime against existence. womanhood and motherhood are perhaps the most potent forces in human society, which of course men have been hasty to quash, for they are right to fear these forces”
“silence. she turned her eyes to the mothers, blood smeared over her face, her cheeks and chin, her eyes alight with what? with madness? power? ecstatic knowing? feral femininity?”
“did she really have no desires anymore? no deep passions? where has the vitriolic emotions and sweeping gestures of her twenties disappeared to?”
“no, no one needed her but a two year old. she could do whatever she wanted- except for crying, which she would do in limited increments while pretending to use the bathroom”
“i am angry all the time, i would one day like to direct my own artwork toward a critique of these modern day systems that articulates all this, but my brain no longer functions as it did before the baby, and i am really dumb now. i am afraid i will never be smart or happy or thin again. i am afraid i might be turning into a dog. instead, she said, smiling, i love it. i love being a mom”
“that single white hot light at the center of the darkness of herself that was the point of origin from which she birthed something new, from which all women do. you light a fire in early girlhood. you stroke it and tend it. you protect it at all costs. you don’t let it rage into a mountain of light, because that’s not the becoming of a girl. you keep it secret. you let it burn. you look into the eyes of other girls and see their fires flickering there, offer conspiratal nods, never speak aloud a near unbearable heat, a growing conflagration. you tend the flame because if you don’t you’re stuck, in the cold, on your own, doomed to seasonal layers, doomed to practicality, doomed to this is just the way things are, doomed to settling and understanding and reasoning and agreeing and seeing it another way and seeing it his way and seeing it from all the other ways but your own”