A review by black_girl_reading
Whiskey & Ribbons by Leesa Cross-Smith

3.0

I found myself a bit stifled reading whiskey & ribbons by Leesa Cross-Smith on a couple of fronts. Firstly, despite the third narrator already being dead (this is NOT a spoiler - his death is central to the whole narrative) the majority of the book takes place over a weekend storm in which two people are stuck together in a house and it is dramatic as hell up in there. Secondly, despite the book being an adult novel, and sex being a central topic, the intensity of it felt a bit young adult fiction to me (this book had claustrophobic elements of the sun is also a star that I wasn’t fond of). The constant focus on who had sex with who/when they had sex/if they were having sex/if they were going to have sex read as very juvenile to me. Finally, and I don’t know if the author is aware of this, the social conservatism around women and sexuality was abundantly clear. The men were all able to be complex sexual beings, but the women who had premarital sex were at best captured as somehow more dark, but honestly, were mostly characterized in a “virgin/whore” dichotomy and either disposable, vixens, likeable but desperate or lacking in some way; all of this compared to a central character who was a virgin until marriage and was definitely written as the pure angel of the book. I found it moralizing in a way I wasn’t fond of, I am not okay with religion being used to diminish women who don’t fit a certain profile, and whether Cross-Smith did this intentionally or not (it felt like something she uncritically and unthinkingly contributed to but idk 🤷🏿‍♀️) it was a huge thorn in my side. So, those were the downsides for me. I did find the content around a major reveal to be very accurate in terms of the pain that parents can create, and the rejection that can happen for children when adults practice self preservation at all costs. I also felt the loss of the third narrator at times, as a wife and mother, and that was very touching. But really, the whole book had a Tyler Perry Woman Thou Art Loosed feel about it with one character in particular, and that is not a compliment. Bad women getting what they deserve, with a thin veil of complexity over an age old way to shame women irked me.