beforeviolets's reviews
431 reviews

Richard II by William Shakespeare

woah... actually in my top 3 favorite shakespeare plays. I WILL be talking of graves, of worms, and epitaphs!! maybe we should sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings??? 

A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher

T. Kingfisher, never stop writing quirky and headstrong older women, bizarre eclectic casts of characters, and fairytale retellings.

I sadly have no familiarity with the Goose Girl fairy tale so can’t comment on this as a retelling as I would usually, but this is an average T. Kingfisher win. 

CW: abusive parent/child abuse, abusive relationship, murder, blood, animal death, blood & gore, mind control, violence

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

looove shirley jackson but I fear this one was a bit beyond me. it might be better in a reread.

The Lumberjack's Dove: A Poem by GennaRose Nethercott

The love I have for GennaRose's writing is unmeasureable.

This is one of those stories that I see myself coming back to at various points in my life and finding new lines to resonate with and new angles to approach it with, which is I think exactly what this narrative wants of its audience.

For future reference for myself, the bit that connects with me the most here and now is:

Today, home is a thing he can hold, as long as he doesn't hold too tight. A place that balances in an open hand. This will not happen again. Home is not in the habit of repeating itself.

Bad Graces by Kyrie McCauley

Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
-The Tempest 1.2

I once read somewhere that no man is an island. But I think maybe girls are.

It's been a few months since I've read a Shakespeare retelling, hasn't it? Well this week, I was studying The Tempest for class (not for the first time), was craving a horror read, and figured maybe it was time for me to pick up this sapphic Tempest-inspired story with Yellowjackets vibes.

Now, I was expecting more of a direct retelling, which this story wasn't. It's not so much that it's reimagining The Tempest but holding a conversation with it. Certain elements feel superimposed upon each other, but don't follow direct parallels in regards to the narrative or characters.

In this book, we follow Violet Whitlock: a "volatile" child in foster care who struggles with school and relationships, feral and sharp in all the places little girls should be tame and obedient. So Violet borrows the name and academic resume of her golden child twin sister to apply for a summer contest with the Shakespeare Center, with one lucky winner getting to accompany a group of teen celebrities to the filming of a new movie adaptation of (you guessed it, reader,) The Tempest. But when their slimy male director decides to take them on a whaling journey instead of a direct plane flight to the set, the ship finds itself in the middle of a (there's literally no other way I can word this, you must understand) tempest and ends up washing the girls and their director ashore on a remote island off the Pacific Coast. But the island isn't everything it seems and the girls find themselves metamorphosing in their fight for survival.

As a horror novel alone, this book was compelling and exciting and unbelievably nauseating. The body horror alone had me swallowing down bile on the tube. I'm sure many people in public wondered why I looked so green. In contrast to the dizzying gore, this book had incredibly lush and stunning atmosphere and descriptors. The island was haunting and unnerving, sure, but like Caliban's speech about his own island, was enchanting and alluring and abundant in its beauty. It was dream-like, yet viscerally easy to picture. This is a book that calls for a gorgeous adaptation or at least some beautiful fanart. (If I have time amidst grad school life, I'll try, I promise.)

But the best part of this book is its allegorical applications. See, this story is about trauma. It's about the claws and armor that young girls have to build in order to keep themselves safe from prying eyes and roaming hands. And it would've been enough to make the survival efforts of the shipwreck girls a parallel for the perpetual state of survival they embody in the real world. But McCauley takes a step further through the more speculative elements of this story to hold questions about trauma and healing, leaning into the ways that the scars can change people inside and out.

I did leave the book craving just a few more Tempest parallels, especially since the application of Shakespeare onto the text was quite heavy-handed. (Not only was the play constantly quoted, but generally, the girls seemed to be named entirely after Shakespeare characters. Which I thought would perhaps lean into a commentary about the way female characters in Shakespeare are treated, a la Enter The Body, but one of them wasn't even named after a female character, and the traits or experiences of said characters had no relation to McCauley's, so it seemed more of a surface-level choice for a wink and a nudge.) There was also a brief line towards the end that does work to parallel some of the book's plot to The Tempest. I had mixed feelings about this, as in some ways, I think it would have been more advantageous to leave that interpretation up to the reader. Especially since this reading of the play called Sycorax the "villain" and implied that the girls were Prospero, which unsettled me considering a lot of the contemporary discussions involving race and land interpretations of the original text. I forgive McCauley because not everyone is neck-deep in Shakespeare scholarship every day like I am, but I just wish it had been open for those parallels to be assigned by the readership in personally impactful ways, especially with the connections to the play being as loose as they were. BUT. That being said, the relationship of the land to the girls, the conversations about bodily autonomy, and the themes of freedom and survival provided this story with plenty of comparative elements to the original play, all of which I thought were utilized beautifully.

Overall, just a really good YA horror with allegory, atmosphere, sapphics, and Shakespeare.

CW: body horror, blood & gore, violence, drowning, injury detail, adult/minor relationship, grooming, emesis, death, suicide, animal death, character death

Let's Split Up by Bill Wood

The comps for this book are perhaps the most accurate I've ever seen, Bill knew his mission and knew his audience. This fast-paced thriller is such a compulsive and quick read, and a wonderful YA horror ode to Scooby Doo and cheesy slasher movies.

CW: murder, violence, blood & gore, hospitalization, fire, alcoholism, kidnapping, child death

These Violent Delights by Micah Nemerever

5.0

All they were – all they ever had been – was a pair of sunflowers who each believed the other was the sun.

The toxic, gay, Jewish, dark academia-adjacent thriller of my dreams. I can't believe this took me so long to get around to, because this is one of the most beautiful and well-written and fucked up books I've ever read.

There's almost too much to say about this book that there's barely anything to say at all. Every single choice and word in this book is deliberately and brilliantly chosen to encapsulate its layered themes, complicated dynamics, unsettling tone, and unreliable characters. My fingers are twitching over my keyboard, aching to ooze out words of particular praises and meditated observations, but at the same time... I can't think of anything to say. It's not sufficient to say that I'm impressed and obsessed. And yet, that's all I have.

CW: violence, toxic relationship, death, blood & gore, murder, drowning, drugging, animal death, injury detail, suicide (past), death of father (past), abusive parents, self-harm, fire

Our Wives Under The Sea by Julia Armfield

What an unusual and gorgeously written story. Julia Armfield absolutely has my attention, and I can't wait to read more of her work beyond this one.

I do feel a little on the outside of this book, especially after seeing reviews from friends who clearly found themselves emotionally distraught over the narrative or in possession of a new favorite story. I think, unfortunately for me, I was expecting (and hoping for) a horror book with a literary flair, rather than a literary story with speculative and horror elements leaking in at the corners of the narrative. This disappointment and fault, of course, lies in me, because this approach is beautiful and gorgeously impactful in its own way.

At times feeling like a Doctor Who trapped-in-a-vessel episode and at other times, being a profound exploratory metaphor for grief, this book marries different worlds and genres into one unsettling and metamorphic tale. There's something sinister and nightmarish hiding in the shadows of this story, unseen, filling the reader with horrifying unknowns and uncertainty. But these narrative bogeymen are left to lurk in the margins as the pages illuminate the inner worlds and daily lives of our main characters. I found this slow, tangential approach to the narrative to serve the perspectives, properly mirroring both the creeping spiral of grief, and the maddening mundanity of fear. Though I do find this metaphor-driven, literary approach to fall short for me at times. I can't help but wish there were just a few more actual events to the story, a couple moments to arouse shivers down my spine or conjure the slightest of gasps. I needed a bit more horror. The monsters between the lines may have prompted me with questions and unease, but weren't enough to keep me up at night or make me check over my shoulder.

I would absolutely recommend this book, and can understand why this resonates so much with its readers. Maybe it'll hit me better in a period of grief and I'll find myself wanting to revisit it. But I would definitely recommend this as less of a horror and more of a haunting and unsettling allegorical literary fiction.

CW: claustrophobia, drowning, death, character death, grief, death of parents (past), fatphobia, body horror, blood & gore, death of loved one

Shakespeare's White Others by David Sterling Brown

Shakespeare’s White Others by David Sterling Brown eloquently carves out a corner of early modern critical race studies through the examination of the “white other.” This figure, as Brown presents it, is a white character that defines the boundaries of whiteness by violating – or seeming to violate – societal, emotional, and behavioral norms expected to be performed by white individuals. Along with textual analysis, Brown’s thesis is informed by Black experiences, culture, and movements, connecting his arguments to collective histories and scholarship, within and beyond Shakespeare.

By placing a focus on intraracial rather than interracial othering, Brown transforms plays outside of the standard Shakespeare “race plays” into treasure troves of racial analysis. He reveals that many of the ways characters who are othered in Shakespeare’s canon are described in relation to blackness as a method of promoting white hegemony beyond the treatment of Black individuals. This is touched on throughout the book, through discussions of plays such as Much Ado About Nothing, Macbeth, and centered primarily in his first chapter on Hamlet. Through these analyses, Brown shows how white characters can be “blackened” or turned into “white others” through their defiance of (or perceived defiance of) gender roles, sexual obedience, national pride, innocence, Christian law, or any other societal expectation placed on them. These examples help clearly define the birth and role of the white other.

When Brown does analyze “race plays,” he does so by shifting the discussions of racial analysis away from the characters that earn the plays their category of “race plays.” Historically, critical race approaches to such plays focus on deconstructing anti-Blackness and racism in the writing of the plays’ visibly non-white characters. In Brown’s approach of analyzing intraracial othering, he proposes looking at race beyond these characters. In perhaps the most well-argued and perspective-changing chapter, Brown looks at Titus Andronicus, insisting that the blame placed on Aaron as a catalyst of the play’s violence – by the play’s characters and even by early modern scholars – serves as a distraction from the play’s intraracial color-lines. Diagnosing the roles of the Romans and the Goths as the “whites” and “white others,” Brown exposes the cannibalistic, incestuous nature of white hegemony as it appears in and beyond Shakespeare’s plays. This approach is duplicated in the chapter on Antony and Cleopatra, in which Antony is assigned the role of “white other” due to his betrayal of Rome and therefore, his “whiteness.” By removing the Black characters as the central source of race in these plays, Brown opens another approach to examining Tamora’s and Antony’s relationship to whiteness and the world of these stories at large.

Some of the other arguments in this book are comparatively more tangential. The first features in Chapter 3, “On the Other Hand.” This brilliant title alludes to the pivoting of perspective from the previous chapters’ approaches – instead of discussing a white character who is “blackened” in the narrative, it discusses a Black character who is “whitened” in the narrative – as well as the chapter’s central argument: tracing female characters’ “white hands” as symbols of male attention and ownership. Though this point focuses on the “whitening” of a Black character rather than a white other, it ties into the narrative of the white other, used to present Antony’s proclamation of Cleopatra’s “white hand” as an act of conquest over her body and an attempt to reclaim his previously “white” and “superior” Roman reputation. The end of the chapter also reconnects to the central thesis of discussing whiteness as a tool of racial violence, when Cleopatra’s “white” hands are framed as a tool of violence against Black bodies as a call to consider the hidden violence against Blackness behind the “white” hand and its association with innocence through its whiteness.

Unfortunately, I found Brown’s chapter on Othello to be far too tangential, drifting the analysis away from the central thesis of the book. The beginning of the chapter presents Iago as the story’s “white other,” providing a thorough exploration of his manipulation of racial anxieties to torture Othello in a form of psychological and emotional rape. However, most of the chapter loses sight of the “white other,” instead describing forms of sexual trauma and violence inflicted on Black men and the history of the silencing of Black trauma. Brown presents this topic well, with ample research and clear theses, but only briefly pauses in these sections of the chapter to tie loose threads of this argument to Othello, lacking crucial textual analysis and explanation about the play or about the relationship to the “white other.” This argument about Othello’s relationship to the historical and modern Black experience of trauma is necessary work, but perhaps would be better presented in a separate publication and referenced in this chapter.

Towards the end of the book, beginning in the chapter on Othello, Brown begins to apply a more personal approach. In the most interesting example of this personal connection as a tool of analysis, The Comedy of Errors’s portrayal of identity confusion is related to Brown’s own experience with racial profiling to examine the pedagogical potential for the book’s central discussion. Through the connections between Brown’s experience as a Black man and Shakespeare’s characters’ experiences of “othering” through silencing, imprisonment, projection of identity, marginalization, erasure, death, and more, Brown expresses the necessity of looking within whiteness to find the white hegemony’s tools of oppression.

Brown’s arguments in this book will resonate deeply with critics, scholars, and Shakespeare readers who are interested in multi-faceted, antiracist approaches to early modern study. By necessarily relating intraracial dynamics to modern intraracial experiences, Brown turns the critique away from the Black “other” and onto white self-harm as a method of racist violence. Though his arguments are tangential at times, his thesis is sound and filled with intellect and urgency of equal measure. His personal approach, underlined by the work of Black scholars, Black theorists, and Black culture at large, creates a unique, urgent, and approachable argument that calls upon Shakespeareans everywhere to examine their own biases to these texts and their previous understanding of race relations in Shakespeare’s plays.

I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in exploring complex racial dynamics in Shakespeare's plays or how these plays can relate to the modern systems of anti-Blackness. Whether you're a theater practitioner, scholar, teacher, student, or general Shakespeare reader, this book is a fundamental read to inform an antiracist approach.

Straight Acting: The Hidden Queer Lives of William Shakespeare by Will Tosh

An incredible read for anyone interested in Shakespeare and/or queer history. Through fictional vignettes and a glorious web of research, Will Tosh provides a clear picture of Shakespeare's life and world through a queer lens.

This book has sparked so many interests and has introduced me to so many new rabbit holes to dig down, and I can't wait to investigate the inspirations for this book and the many queer contemporaries of Shakespeare.