A review by abookishmagpie
Unlikeable Female Characters by Anna Bogutskaya

challenging emotional informative medium-paced

2.5

I randomly saw this non-fiction book on a BookTuber’s video, and it caught my eye right away. As a big pop-culture nerd who studied gender related issues, I am always excited to see any type of book that combines the two and looks at the dynamics as they are represented in our pop culture and society. In this book the author narrows in on the idea of “unlikeable female characters” in TV and movies and provides a set of nine specific roles they tend to fall into; The Bitch, The Mean Girl, The Angry Woman, The Slut, The Trainwreck, The Crazy Woman, The Psycho, The Shrew and The Weirdo. These categories get their own chapter and are explored by one or two characters the author thinks best represents the type of women and just how their characteristics make them “unlikable” as well as giving a little history lesson on the dynamics of Hollywood and how such strict ways a woman can be represented came to be. It is for sure that the author is passionate about this topic and that she has done the research and has a vast knowledge of the characters that are best known to fit these categories, and for some people this will be an eye-opening read. However, for me as someone who has studied this stuff and taken an avid interest in it myself I didn’t really learn anything new in terms of analysis of the representation of these types of women and how they compare to their male counterparts. In fact I think that the author could have gone farther than she did in some aspects, she could have had one specific women for each category and do an intense dive into them and what makes them unlikeable verses the surface level we got so she could cover multiple characters. It’s good, but definitely not as intriguing or engaging as I was hoping to find.