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A review by thecrookedspine
Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
5.0
No Spoilers:
Her Body and Other Parties is written with all the shock and force of a compound fracture. Machado brings an almost supernatural level of awareness to the small, tactile things of life, grounding her otherwise often surrealist stories in a stark reality. Her commitment to representing the queer, female experience as synonymous with a protagonist-worthy experience is laudable, and I personally found the variance from hetero-male-centric media therapeutic.
The quality of the stories is ridiculously high (especially for a debut book), and consistently so in all but one case - though even then it’s still an enjoyable story to read. Her pacing, prose, stories, and characters are excellent. The only area of her craft I felt often seemed weak was dialogue, but she seemed to know this about herself (or at least feel uncomfortable writing it) because dialogue is light in most of the short stories.
I originally rented this book from the library, but actually went out to buy a copy a little over halfway through just to support the author and encourage more work like this. If you like Hemingway, surrealist fiction like Haruki Marukami, and viscerally poetic prose, I think you’re quite likely to enjoy this.
Her Body and Other Parties is written with all the shock and force of a compound fracture. Machado brings an almost supernatural level of awareness to the small, tactile things of life, grounding her otherwise often surrealist stories in a stark reality. Her commitment to representing the queer, female experience as synonymous with a protagonist-worthy experience is laudable, and I personally found the variance from hetero-male-centric media therapeutic.
The quality of the stories is ridiculously high (especially for a debut book), and consistently so in all but one case - though even then it’s still an enjoyable story to read. Her pacing, prose, stories, and characters are excellent. The only area of her craft I felt often seemed weak was dialogue, but she seemed to know this about herself (or at least feel uncomfortable writing it) because dialogue is light in most of the short stories.
I originally rented this book from the library, but actually went out to buy a copy a little over halfway through just to support the author and encourage more work like this. If you like Hemingway, surrealist fiction like Haruki Marukami, and viscerally poetic prose, I think you’re quite likely to enjoy this.