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A review by lspain_eddington
Maeve Fly by CJ Leede
dark
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
This was…something. I should start by saying I normally don’t read horror, and it normally is very much not my genre. But I decided to read this because it was billed a feminist American Psycho and I do enjoy suspense. And it is spooky season, so I thought, “Why not?”
Maeve is certainly an antihero main character and I enjoyed her strangeness. She is funny in that she is sarcastic and crass and doesn’t really care what anyone thinks of her. I liked the *idea* that a woman could be unhinged and that she didn’t need to go through any specific trauma to be psychotic. But I don’t think that makes this book feminist (more on that later). The whole of the novel is a character study of Maeve and her psychoses and the people around her that “see” her. I thought this aspect of the story was interesting and honestly probably would’ve loved just to hear her inner dialogue sans the gore/sexual content.
All that said, it seemed like the book was shocking, gory, and graphic only for the sake of being shocking, gory, and graphic. I don’t think the gore or the graphic sexual content really added anything to the story other than shock value—which if that WAS the goal, it certainly accomplished that. But I’m also not leaving this book feeling like this accomplished anything feminist for me. It seemed that this book assumes a sort of post-feminism about society, but I could see a world in which someone (probably a man—sorry dudes) reads this and says, “yeah, the ladies are crazy.” I’d be curious to hear a different take on this, but to me it just felt like a misrepresentation of feminism as a movement, and the message got lost in the graphic-ness of everything else.
3 stars because I didn’t hate it, but probably not one I will be recommending to folks unless they’re into weird, gory stuff.
Content warnings: lots of gore and graphic sexual violence/sexual content
Maeve is certainly an antihero main character and I enjoyed her strangeness. She is funny in that she is sarcastic and crass and doesn’t really care what anyone thinks of her. I liked the *idea* that a woman could be unhinged and that she didn’t need to go through any specific trauma to be psychotic. But I don’t think that makes this book feminist (more on that later). The whole of the novel is a character study of Maeve and her psychoses and the people around her that “see” her. I thought this aspect of the story was interesting and honestly probably would’ve loved just to hear her inner dialogue sans the gore/sexual content.
All that said, it seemed like the book was shocking, gory, and graphic only for the sake of being shocking, gory, and graphic. I don’t think the gore or the graphic sexual content really added anything to the story other than shock value—which if that WAS the goal, it certainly accomplished that. But I’m also not leaving this book feeling like this accomplished anything feminist for me. It seemed that this book assumes a sort of post-feminism about society, but I could see a world in which someone (probably a man—sorry dudes) reads this and says, “yeah, the ladies are crazy.” I’d be curious to hear a different take on this, but to me it just felt like a misrepresentation of feminism as a movement, and the message got lost in the graphic-ness of everything else.
3 stars because I didn’t hate it, but probably not one I will be recommending to folks unless they’re into weird, gory stuff.
Content warnings: lots of gore and graphic sexual violence/sexual content
Content Warnings
Graphic: Gore, Sexual content, and Violence