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A review by _s_i_s_s_i
In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
4.75
I thought this book was absolutely brilliant but it also took me weeks to read. Not just every chapter, but almost every page was triggering if you have experienced domestic abuse. That may seem obvious, as that is the subject of the book, but CMM’s immersive writing style and choice of second person perspective got to me in a way few other things have.
That may be specific to me and my experience, but as CMM says in the books <mild spoiler> “It was terrible because I wanted to believe that my love was unique, and my pain was unique… but then I opened book after book about lesbian abuse and saw pseudonyms women regurgitating everything that happened to me. There’s a pie chart that encompasses those years of my life” <mild spoiler> So I wanted to include a more detailed trigger warning then I seen in other reviews.
I volunteer with a crisis line and deal with DV content on the regular, and feel fine about it, but if I sat and read more than five pages at a time of “In The Dream House“ I would be thrown into turmoil.
I’m a bisexual woman that was in a relationship with a heterosexual man and almost every account that CMM shared of her experiences was a carbon copy to my life. Well I don’t want to shift the focus, my queer identity was a focal piece of the abuse I received and I think the chapters that spoke to the universality of abuse felt incredibly poignant to me.
I would absolutely add this book to curriculum around abuse, specifically emotional and verbal and the complexities of how that is different from physical abuse.
The -0.25 stars is for that I didn’t care for the footnote style she chose over using endnotes. If there was commentary that was needed on that page, I would have preferred it be incorporated into the text
That may be specific to me and my experience, but as CMM says in the books <mild spoiler> “It was terrible because I wanted to believe that my love was unique, and my pain was unique… but then I opened book after book about lesbian abuse and saw pseudonyms women regurgitating everything that happened to me. There’s a pie chart that encompasses those years of my life” <mild spoiler> So I wanted to include a more detailed trigger warning then I seen in other reviews.
I volunteer with a crisis line and deal with DV content on the regular, and feel fine about it, but if I sat and read more than five pages at a time of “In The Dream House“ I would be thrown into turmoil.
I’m a bisexual woman that was in a relationship with a heterosexual man and almost every account that CMM shared of her experiences was a carbon copy to my life. Well I don’t want to shift the focus, my queer identity was a focal piece of the abuse I received and I think the chapters that spoke to the universality of abuse felt incredibly poignant to me.
I would absolutely add this book to curriculum around abuse, specifically emotional and verbal and the complexities of how that is different from physical abuse.
The -0.25 stars is for that I didn’t care for the footnote style she chose over using endnotes. If there was commentary that was needed on that page, I would have preferred it be incorporated into the text
Content Warnings
Graphic: Car accident