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A review by cosmas
In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
5.0
Title & Author: In The Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
Rating: 5 Stars
Trigger warnings: emotional battery, abuse, sexual assault
Summary: Machado’s In The Dream House is a creative nonfiction piece that centers around abuse in queer relationships; we see our narrator, assumed to be Machado herself, detail the emotional, physical, and mental strain of a queer abusive relationship, which touches on gaslighting, queer history with abuse, public perception of queer relationships, and more.
Like: Machado is a master in style and structure, effortlessly experimenting with multiple containers and tying in research that flows with the emotional arc of the story as a whole. The footnotes and epigraphs she provides throughout offer us the right amount of reflection on, and foreshadowing for, the coming/past events. The research she included did a wonderful job bringing to the limelight the lack of documentation and recognition of abuse in queer relationships. For the consequences of abuse itself, she calls on old movies, tv shows, and literature to vicariously detail the pain that Machado had to go through with the distorted and dreamy perception of film; we, as Machado was, are always questioning what is real. Spoiler: it’s all real, we just don’t want it to be.
Dislike: To be frank, I’m nit-picking a bit with what I disliked, but alas: This book is divided up into four “acts,” and I found the last three acts significantly stronger and emotionally charged than the first two acts. While I stand by the fact that the overall emotional arc was strong and consistent, it’s noticeable that Machado’s heavy hitters are concentrated in the latter half, acts three and four (notable fragments: “Dream house as Five Lights” and “Dream House in The Queen and the Squid” amongst many more). As vague as it may seem, I was looking for more of that memorableness in the first two acts.
Round-Up/Recommendations: Overall, I would definitely recommend this book to read. Not only is it well structured, beautifully written, and emotional, it is deep, rich, and serves as a resource (one of the first of many, hopefully) for queer abuse. Books similar to this one in structure would be, one, Elissa Washuta’s White Magic, another creative nonfiction piece that is fragment-structured that centers around the narrator's emotional journey about relationships, abuse, and identity. I’d also recommend The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, by Taylor Jenkins Reid (a personal favorite of mine) a romance fiction novel that centers around a queer protagonist in the limelight of Hollywood, where she’s forced to explore her sexuality in secret; while this book centers more so on sexuality than abuse, and the structure itself is extremely different than Machado’s (no fragments here), it addresses themes of male dominance/abuse/power that I think offer additional insight into the “male/female” domestic abuse dynamic that Machado explores in her novel.
Rating: 5 Stars
Trigger warnings: emotional battery, abuse, sexual assault
Summary: Machado’s In The Dream House is a creative nonfiction piece that centers around abuse in queer relationships; we see our narrator, assumed to be Machado herself, detail the emotional, physical, and mental strain of a queer abusive relationship, which touches on gaslighting, queer history with abuse, public perception of queer relationships, and more.
Like: Machado is a master in style and structure, effortlessly experimenting with multiple containers and tying in research that flows with the emotional arc of the story as a whole. The footnotes and epigraphs she provides throughout offer us the right amount of reflection on, and foreshadowing for, the coming/past events. The research she included did a wonderful job bringing to the limelight the lack of documentation and recognition of abuse in queer relationships. For the consequences of abuse itself, she calls on old movies, tv shows, and literature to vicariously detail the pain that Machado had to go through with the distorted and dreamy perception of film; we, as Machado was, are always questioning what is real. Spoiler: it’s all real, we just don’t want it to be.
Dislike: To be frank, I’m nit-picking a bit with what I disliked, but alas: This book is divided up into four “acts,” and I found the last three acts significantly stronger and emotionally charged than the first two acts. While I stand by the fact that the overall emotional arc was strong and consistent, it’s noticeable that Machado’s heavy hitters are concentrated in the latter half, acts three and four (notable fragments: “Dream house as Five Lights” and “Dream House in The Queen and the Squid” amongst many more). As vague as it may seem, I was looking for more of that memorableness in the first two acts.
Round-Up/Recommendations: Overall, I would definitely recommend this book to read. Not only is it well structured, beautifully written, and emotional, it is deep, rich, and serves as a resource (one of the first of many, hopefully) for queer abuse. Books similar to this one in structure would be, one, Elissa Washuta’s White Magic, another creative nonfiction piece that is fragment-structured that centers around the narrator's emotional journey about relationships, abuse, and identity. I’d also recommend The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, by Taylor Jenkins Reid (a personal favorite of mine) a romance fiction novel that centers around a queer protagonist in the limelight of Hollywood, where she’s forced to explore her sexuality in secret; while this book centers more so on sexuality than abuse, and the structure itself is extremely different than Machado’s (no fragments here), it addresses themes of male dominance/abuse/power that I think offer additional insight into the “male/female” domestic abuse dynamic that Machado explores in her novel.