A review by mmseitz822
An Untamed State by Roxane Gay

4.0

This book is brutal. If you're looking for a light read, THIS IS NOT IT. After reading the description and some of the reviews I honestly didn't know if I should read this but I decided to anyway. This book punches you in the gut and digs a knife into your heart and makes you sick and sad and sorry. I had a hard time rating this because how can you "really like" a book in which the main character - a strong, confident, feisty woman - ends up broken down, beaten, raped, and degraded in ways most people could never even imagine? However, I thought the character and the experience were both portrayed so honestly. In a perfect world, Mireille would have run home into her husband's arms and would have been fine again eventually ... but it is not a perfect world. An Untamed State doesn't sugarcoat that for a reader and so I have to give it a lot of props. I think this book will stay with me for a while.