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A review by sarahbrown93
An Untamed State by Roxane Gay
5.0
This book feels so important as you read it and even more intensely after. It feels strange to recommend it to another person because of how truly devastating and unflinching it is throughout the entire novel, but a book has never made me feel more intensely aware and captivated. Of course I’ve read great books, but this felt more like a necessary experience than a story to me.
It was hard to see this book as a novel because it felt so real the entire time. I’ve seen complaints that the characters weren’t as likable as some people may have wished, but why should they be? They came off as strikingly real to me and it would have done this impeccable story of trauma a disservice to whittle the characters down to predictably likable fantasies. Personally, I loved Mireille very easily and I appreciated that she was so complex, even exaggeratedly so. It would have been a disservice to the character to make her too easy to love because women are not always too easy to love. Gay paints a perfect picture of why that is and how important it is to understand that the world does not make it easy on women. Somehow, I ended this novel with a sense of hope. As much as this is a story about trauma, I think it is also a story about survival on your own terms.
I’m trying to write this spoiler free, so I don’t want to go much further. Just read this and prepare to not want to stop reading it because it’s very important to see this woman survive. You should also prepare to cry a lot because like I said, you feel this story in your bones.
It was hard to see this book as a novel because it felt so real the entire time. I’ve seen complaints that the characters weren’t as likable as some people may have wished, but why should they be? They came off as strikingly real to me and it would have done this impeccable story of trauma a disservice to whittle the characters down to predictably likable fantasies. Personally, I loved Mireille very easily and I appreciated that she was so complex, even exaggeratedly so. It would have been a disservice to the character to make her too easy to love because women are not always too easy to love. Gay paints a perfect picture of why that is and how important it is to understand that the world does not make it easy on women. Somehow, I ended this novel with a sense of hope. As much as this is a story about trauma, I think it is also a story about survival on your own terms.
I’m trying to write this spoiler free, so I don’t want to go much further. Just read this and prepare to not want to stop reading it because it’s very important to see this woman survive. You should also prepare to cry a lot because like I said, you feel this story in your bones.