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A review by danielles_reads
Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction by Melanie R. Anderson, Lisa Kröger
Did not finish book. Stopped at 57%.
DNF @ 57%
There are so many authors covered in this book that each one only gets 5-10 pages, with most of those pages summarizing their work and sometimes only a few paragraphs talking about the authors themselves. You could learn a lot more information by reading their Wikipedia pages. And with so many of the authors writing short stories with similar tropes (seriously how many times do I have to hear Arthur Conan Doyle and H.P. Lovecraft mentioned in a book focusing on women??), they all started blending together since there wasn’t much information about the authors that would differentiate them as actual people.
At first I thought it was because we just don’t know a lot about the female authors in the 17th to 19th centuries (and that does seem to be the case for some of them) so I figured I would at least read up to the chapters for the more recent authors that I’ve read before (Shirley Jackson and Toni Morrison). And yeah, I learned a few new things but the general style remained consistent throughout so I decided to cut my losses there and DNF.
I think this could be enjoyable if you go in expecting a very brief overview of each author and use it as just a starting point to learn more.
There are so many authors covered in this book that each one only gets 5-10 pages, with most of those pages summarizing their work and sometimes only a few paragraphs talking about the authors themselves. You could learn a lot more information by reading their Wikipedia pages. And with so many of the authors writing short stories with similar tropes (seriously how many times do I have to hear Arthur Conan Doyle and H.P. Lovecraft mentioned in a book focusing on women??), they all started blending together since there wasn’t much information about the authors that would differentiate them as actual people.
At first I thought it was because we just don’t know a lot about the female authors in the 17th to 19th centuries (and that does seem to be the case for some of them) so I figured I would at least read up to the chapters for the more recent authors that I’ve read before (Shirley Jackson and Toni Morrison). And yeah, I learned a few new things but the general style remained consistent throughout so I decided to cut my losses there and DNF.
I think this could be enjoyable if you go in expecting a very brief overview of each author and use it as just a starting point to learn more.