#women writing women
The Wolf Den by Elodie Harper
‘May men fall to me as this offering falls to you, Greatest Aphrodite. May I know love’s power, if never it’s sweetness’
I have been wanting to read this book for a long time now, and I am happy to say that it did not disappoint!
The Wolf Den, set in Pompeii’s Lunpar, is the first in a trilogy of novels reimagining the lives of women who have been overlooked in history.
Here, we follow Amara through her journey as slave, sold into prostitution after the death of her father plunged her family into poverty, we get to know a woman who is smart, resourceful and willing to do whatever it takes to earn her freedom. Through Amara, we also get to meet the other women at the brothel with her. Each of these women are as well written as Amara, with compelling and complicated histories, and it is not a hardship to fall in love with them in this story.
Harper has managed to navigate the stories of these women, and the brutal lives they have to live quite brilliantly, and with great sensitivity. While the story is set around a brothel, and is about the lives of women who are ‘working’ as prostitutes, the sex scenes are not over the top or grotesque. It is very much a novel where it’s a woman writing for women, with an awareness of exactly what stories need to be told.
I would say it’s a ‘medium paced’ story, but hard to put down once you start reading it! It only took me two days, that that too because I had to stop reading while I was at work, and to sleep
If you enjoyed Circe, Silence of the Girls and Penelopiad, basically if you enjoy classical retellings with a focus on the voices of women, this is the book for you!
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Look what just got here! Women In The Picture by Catherine McCormack!
As some who has done a bit of research, with the intention to do a lot more, on how women’s bodies are seen and presented in, be that on Shakespeare’s stage or in the pages of the contemporary graphic novel, this book immediately caught my eye! I am really looking forward to reading this book!!
A perfect pin-up, a damsel in distress, a saintly mother, a femme fatale …
Women’s identity has long been stifled by a limited set of archetypes, found everywhere in pictures from art history’s classics to advertising, while women artists have been overlooked and held back from shaping more empowering roles.
In this impassioned book, art historian Catherine McCormack asks us to look again at what these images have told us to value, opening up our most loved images – from those of Titian and Botticelli to Picasso and the Pre-Raphaelites. She also shows us how women artists – from Berthe Morisot to Beyoncé, Judy Chicago to Kara Walker – have offered us new ways of thinking about women’s identity, sexuality, race and power.
Women in the Picture gives us new ways of seeing the art of the past and the familiar images of today so that we might free women from these restrictive roles and embrace the breadth of women’s vision.
Blurb via @iconbooks
I have heard all of the stories about girls like me, and I am unafraid to make more of them
Currently reading; Her Body and Other Parties, a collection of short stories by Carmen Maria Machado.
I am three stories in, and so far I am loving it. There is something so enchanting about the way Machado writes these stories…they almost wrap around you as you read them, and nothing else matters during that time…
At this stage, I would highly recommend this book
Oh my goodness.. boysss. WELL!! IDK!!
