Review by mollymoll44 - Lady Macbeth

1.75

This did not do it for me. I usually love retellings from the female villain. But I always saw Lady Macbeth as an established and dedicated wife, and this feminist telling of her being incredibly young, foreign, wrathful, and vengeful to Macbeth before she even met him (because of her predisposed racist perception of his people!) didn’t click for me. In the original Shakespeare play she was his “dearest partner of greatness” and sees her as an equal. Making this a feminist retelling where a young girl fears for her body the whole time felt completely unnecessary. Making her a simpering young girl takes away all of the agency of the original lady Macbeth. There’s plenty of historical stories to throw heaps of sexual trauma at the fmc, so there was no reason to ruin this one with it when Lady Macbeth was already so ahead of the times. And it’s not strong enough of a story by itself without riding the coattails of the Macbeth play. The themes of freedom and survival were too heavy handed and simplified in my opinion for the potential it had.
I wouldn’t have finished this if it wasn’t so short and I hadn’t waited so long on Libby for it. The narrator was pretty banger though with her accents. Also yiokes at the dragon porn. Whyyy