A review by somanybookstoread
Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay

informative reflective tense

3.5

I hovered between three and four stars here, but felt generous. Roxane Gay is smart and well-articulated. She’s no nonsense, isn’t pretentious, and has written a collection of essays that is part social commentary, part literary criticism, and part personal. She is not heavy-handed, but she is negative. I felt worn down by this collection because I knew every essay I started would be critical, but also critically unhappy and tell me as the reader all of the problems she found in whatever it was she was analyzing. Balance could have been acheived by including some positive examples of life, literature, and society too. This would have had me reach for the work more often. But that’s my personal bias and need for positivity in life. I would read more of Gay’s work. Thanks to this collection, I realized how much I do enjoy reading literary criticism. It had been a while.