hamnaahsann's review against another edition
3.0
I enjoyed the author’s writing style a lot, she is really good at getting her message out in a clear and convincing way with a little mix of humor and incorporating tragic moments at just the right time to impact the reader. Some of her takes were not my favorite, though.
christinasun's review against another edition
dark
emotional
funny
informative
reflective
fast-paced
4.0
fuyuko's review against another edition
medium-paced
3.0
It’s very much a pop culture beginner guide into what feminism can be for you. There is no ‘deep’ dive into the different types of feminism or the history of feminism. There is surface level critique of feminism and gender conformity, class, and race, but I wish she had dived deeper into that. This book could have been 200 pages tbh. Read Hood Feminism or Angela Davis instead if you are looking for a deeper dive. I will say she is a good writer and the audiobook narrator was excellent!
sabrinames's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
funny
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
lady_literati's review against another edition
4.0
I want to like this. And most part were good to read and definitely relatable… however, it did seem oddly men centered, which is odd to say.
I don’t know. It was just okay.
I don’t know. It was just okay.
claire_melanie's review against another edition
5.0
This is probably the best feminist book I've ever read. This woman is the bomb. She's so nuanced and insightful and yet accessible, interesting, funny, moving and clever. She doesn't preach or pretend to know all the answers, she just convinces you with her passion and analysis about how relevant and necessary feminism still is, despite its flaws and flawed advocates. Love this book so much going to actually buy a copy so I can keep it forever and re-read it many times.
perusinghannah's review against another edition
2.0
(5.3/10) - ⭐⭐.5
I went into this with high expectations, but unfortunately found little that worked for me. While I normally like personal essay collections, these to me read more like brain-dump blog posts that were bound up into a book. This in itself isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but with the way these opinion pieces were structured, I often didn’t have much to grab onto and in some instances failed to see her point entirely.
It might be because nearly every essay references to a certain movie, television show or person, and I was only familiar with roughly 15% of them. While there was some attempt to provide examples from these works or people to illustrate what her opinions were based on, I still lacked the context and experience to fully see where she was coming from. On top of that, quite a few of the critique pieces end in some form of ‘I don’t know why I feel this way’, and… Really? These are personal essays, shouldn’t you have explored that some more if you were going to take the time to write a whole personal piece on it? I felt like she went through a lot of trouble signaling and pointing out problems, but that’s where her pieces abruptly ended. I often found myself going ‘Okay, and?’, and that’s not what I was hoping to get from this collection.
Was it all bad? No, of course not. There are a handful of pieces in here that resonated with me hard, others that let me look at things from a side I wasn’t aware I was dismissing (always a good thing), and there is one piece in particular discussing likeability of fictional characters that will probably stick with me forever and influence how I discuss characters in reviews from now on. There just wasn’t enough of them for me to feel the entire collection was worth the time I put into it.
I went into this with high expectations, but unfortunately found little that worked for me. While I normally like personal essay collections, these to me read more like brain-dump blog posts that were bound up into a book. This in itself isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but with the way these opinion pieces were structured, I often didn’t have much to grab onto and in some instances failed to see her point entirely.
It might be because nearly every essay references to a certain movie, television show or person, and I was only familiar with roughly 15% of them. While there was some attempt to provide examples from these works or people to illustrate what her opinions were based on, I still lacked the context and experience to fully see where she was coming from. On top of that, quite a few of the critique pieces end in some form of ‘I don’t know why I feel this way’, and… Really? These are personal essays, shouldn’t you have explored that some more if you were going to take the time to write a whole personal piece on it? I felt like she went through a lot of trouble signaling and pointing out problems, but that’s where her pieces abruptly ended. I often found myself going ‘Okay, and?’, and that’s not what I was hoping to get from this collection.
Was it all bad? No, of course not. There are a handful of pieces in here that resonated with me hard, others that let me look at things from a side I wasn’t aware I was dismissing (always a good thing), and there is one piece in particular discussing likeability of fictional characters that will probably stick with me forever and influence how I discuss characters in reviews from now on. There just wasn’t enough of them for me to feel the entire collection was worth the time I put into it.
girlgotnoidentity's review against another edition
4.0
I love Roxane Gay. I love the audacity and voice of her writings yet as much I wanted to connect thoroughly to the whole context of these essays, I cannot because I am not at all very familiar with every issue, names, and culture she's talking about. It's good reading and at times, very thought-provoking. I still love and enjoyed my whole reading though.