A review by frenzyreads
In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

adventurous challenging dark emotional funny hopeful informative inspiring mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

5.0

But that's the minority anxiety, right? That is you're not careful, someone will see you -or people who share your identity - doing something human and use it against you. . . . In trying to get people to see your humanity, you reveal just that: your humanity.  Your fundamentally problematic nature. All the unique and terrible ways in which people can, and do, fail. But people have trouble with this concept.'

 Each chapter is entitled "Dream House As ___" and the different lens that Machado views the experience through. 

Each section can almost function as its own vignettes - some of them even more powerful than others. 

The approach that Machado has incorporated here is incredibly creative and powerful in the genre-bending she achieves by considering so many different themes and lens. 

For her own benefit, for the benefit of those who have been in abusive LGBTQIA+ relationships everywhere, she inverts the Archive™️ to create her own archival collection. First person, I, refers to the present Machado, who is on the other side of the relationship, reflecting back and addition, second person perspective is past Machado, locked into a pattern future self has already experienced. 

Machado is achieving a few things here. The archive is a notoriously guarded capsule of academically approved stories, evidence for consumption. Machado is bucking both the safeguards of a very cis, white heterosexual academic institution. Additionally, she is cultivating her own record for examination of the abusive same-sex relationship she has endured to aid others who have been there also. 

Each vignette, from a single sentence to a couple pages, examines The Dream House (the relationship and it's consequences) through a different lens as named. The creativity cracks open memory, storytelling, narrative form. 

A modern classic already and a favourite of so many for good reason. 

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