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eeshybb 's review for:
Till We Have Faces
by C.S. Lewis
And that's on feminine rage.
Orual is a madddd woman, and she wants you to know that you made her like that. I absolutely loved her femcel tendencies. She is such a bad person but I can also deeply empathize with her mortal decisions and messiness and effort and arrogance. Reading through the dramatic irony of knowing Cupid and Psyche's ending created that spicy nature vs nurture paradox, and self-fulfilling prophecies are always incredible storytelling. Orual's characterization as a foil to Psyche was so seamless that you would think she's a part of the original myth. Basically, I expected that this story might make me dislike Psyche, but I didn't expect it to make me like Orual.
The theme of religion in this book really popped off, too. I liked the parallels of the pagan worship of Ungit with the Greek worship of Aphrodite. I loved Orual's cynicism in faith, and her anger that gods and men only favor the beautiful. I loved that the book didn't sugarcoat that she was ugly, and how being ugly meant her story would never be divine. I especially love that her reasons for causing Psyche's ruin were not from jealousy, but from a sick and misunderstood form of love. This book is inspiring me to find others with unattractive main characters that abandon the hierarchy of attraction in its entirety; but hopefully ones that end a bit more optimistically.
My only critique is that the book really lost me at times, though. It reads very much like Siddhartha and some stream of consciousness bits really zoned me out for a couple seconds. It's very much a "I would've hated this as required reading in high school" vibe.
Orual is a madddd woman, and she wants you to know that you made her like that. I absolutely loved her femcel tendencies. She is such a bad person but I can also deeply empathize with her mortal decisions and messiness and effort and arrogance. Reading through the dramatic irony of knowing Cupid and Psyche's ending created that spicy nature vs nurture paradox, and self-fulfilling prophecies are always incredible storytelling. Orual's characterization as a foil to Psyche was so seamless that you would think she's a part of the original myth. Basically, I expected that this story might make me dislike Psyche, but I didn't expect it to make me like Orual.
The theme of religion in this book really popped off, too. I liked the parallels of the pagan worship of Ungit with the Greek worship of Aphrodite. I loved Orual's cynicism in faith, and her anger that gods and men only favor the beautiful. I loved that the book didn't sugarcoat that she was ugly, and how being ugly meant her story would never be divine. I especially love that her reasons for causing Psyche's ruin were not from jealousy, but from a sick and misunderstood form of love. This book is inspiring me to find others with unattractive main characters that abandon the hierarchy of attraction in its entirety; but hopefully ones that end a bit more optimistically.
My only critique is that the book really lost me at times, though. It reads very much like Siddhartha and some stream of consciousness bits really zoned me out for a couple seconds. It's very much a "I would've hated this as required reading in high school" vibe.