Scan barcode
A review by amkclaes
Three Women by Lisa Taddeo
emotional
informative
reflective
fast-paced
3.5
honestly, i really enjoyed the first half of this book and ripped through it. i was really interested in hearing about the emotional development of these women, and how they got to where they were, i feel like Taddeo is really good at drawing a quick portrait of someone by picking out a few evocative details and i found it an enjoyable way to learn about the characters.
then it started to lag. by the end i was hardly interested in any of the stories, to be honest, there was a lot of repetition and it got a bit lazy..
add to that that it was a totally white, just barely almost totally heterosexual account of desire and love.. it's interesting because I'm also reading Sister Outsider, and in Lorde's "Open letter to Mary Daly," she is totally uncompromising on one point: if you accept that women other than cis straight white women are part of womanhood, any account that excludes the others cannot be considered an account of women's anything. so to sell this as an account of women's desire, and then include such limited perspective, is disappointing. Taddeo has a pretty good grip on class dynamics which adds to the analysis, but otherwise it's pretty bland.
finally, there are parts that are literally softcore porn.. which doesn't offend me, but i guess i have trouble taking it seriously.. and for me it didn't really add to a "female gaze" or whatever most of the time. Sloane to me had the most dominance over the gaze during her sex scenes, the rest you could be getting from anyone's perspective really.
then it started to lag. by the end i was hardly interested in any of the stories, to be honest, there was a lot of repetition and it got a bit lazy..
add to that that it was a totally white, just barely almost totally heterosexual account of desire and love.. it's interesting because I'm also reading Sister Outsider, and in Lorde's "Open letter to Mary Daly," she is totally uncompromising on one point: if you accept that women other than cis straight white women are part of womanhood, any account that excludes the others cannot be considered an account of women's anything. so to sell this as an account of women's desire, and then include such limited perspective, is disappointing. Taddeo has a pretty good grip on class dynamics which adds to the analysis, but otherwise it's pretty bland.
finally, there are parts that are literally softcore porn.. which doesn't offend me, but i guess i have trouble taking it seriously.. and for me it didn't really add to a "female gaze" or whatever most of the time. Sloane to me had the most dominance over the gaze during her sex scenes, the rest you could be getting from anyone's perspective really.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Eating disorder, Alcohol, Addiction, Adult/minor relationship, and Death of parent