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A review by beforeviolets
Enter the Body by Joy McCullough
Did not finish book. Stopped at 23%.
Thank you to Penguin Teen for sending me an ARC in exchange for an honest review!
DNF-ing at page 77. (Though I also skipped around a bit later to see some of the conversations develop.)
This book was probably the smallest offender of every book I've ever DNF'd. It wasn't even that bad, it just wasn't strong enough for me to want to continue on. Enter The Body seeks out to reclaim the stories of women from Shakespeare's plays, but seems to lack a central academic thesis pertaining to the "oppressive patriarchy" of these plays that it seeks to criticize. (It wasn't necessarily wrong in its arguments, but felt more driven by a feeling/idea of "wow these women were treated badly, let's talk about it" and lacked a foundation of sources/research that would've provided a lot more nuance and context to sustain this thesis.)
It felt a little too aimless, and without properly defining its critiques before leaping into action, it sort of reads like those high school theatre one act competition plays (you know, the really monologue-heavy ensemble ones that have a sort of a one-word, dimensional theme such as: "love" or "feminism" or "childhood").
I DO think this would be a great book to give to younger Shakespeare fans, especially young teenage girls, to help them connect with these characters. I think, by being set in an odd liminal space, it makes the characters more accessible to a modern perspective. It's a fairly quick and easy text to read and there's definitely an audience out there for it.
(Though I don't think it really helps make sense of the thesis, because I really just couldn't figure out what was attempting to be accomplished in telling these stories in a trap room under the stage in a weird fake space where characters are real people but also not real people who are performing the plays but also living them on the stage, and then have to live in their post-play purgatory before their story starts again? And only the women go under the stage when they die? And why do they exist after they die? Why do they exist at all? Where do the dead male characters go? Are there no actors? Are there actors and these are the ghosts of the characters? Do the people who don't die in the play have their own separate limbo space when their play isn't being performed? Is there Shakespeare-character-heaven? If this is a weird fake space where characters exist to be performed, wouldn't they not exist between performances? Who is at fault for their suffering: the patriarchy of their stories, Shakespeare, the patriarchy of Elizabethan England, the patriarchy of the current world that is performing their plays? I could really go on and on with these questions. The rules of the world were just vague and caused the arguments to struggle to land anywhere because there wasn't any grounded environment for anything to make sense in. I love a good suspension of disbelief, and am happy to accept a weird-limbo-character-space if there's literally any amount of thought to it but there was just nothing to grab onto here.)
DNF-ing at page 77. (Though I also skipped around a bit later to see some of the conversations develop.)
This book was probably the smallest offender of every book I've ever DNF'd. It wasn't even that bad, it just wasn't strong enough for me to want to continue on. Enter The Body seeks out to reclaim the stories of women from Shakespeare's plays, but seems to lack a central academic thesis pertaining to the "oppressive patriarchy" of these plays that it seeks to criticize. (It wasn't necessarily wrong in its arguments, but felt more driven by a feeling/idea of "wow these women were treated badly, let's talk about it" and lacked a foundation of sources/research that would've provided a lot more nuance and context to sustain this thesis.)
It felt a little too aimless, and without properly defining its critiques before leaping into action, it sort of reads like those high school theatre one act competition plays (you know, the really monologue-heavy ensemble ones that have a sort of a one-word, dimensional theme such as: "love" or "feminism" or "childhood").
I DO think this would be a great book to give to younger Shakespeare fans, especially young teenage girls, to help them connect with these characters. I think, by being set in an odd liminal space, it makes the characters more accessible to a modern perspective. It's a fairly quick and easy text to read and there's definitely an audience out there for it.
(Though I don't think it really helps make sense of the thesis, because I really just couldn't figure out what was attempting to be accomplished in telling these stories in a trap room under the stage in a weird fake space where characters are real people but also not real people who are performing the plays but also living them on the stage, and then have to live in their post-play purgatory before their story starts again? And only the women go under the stage when they die? And why do they exist after they die? Why do they exist at all? Where do the dead male characters go? Are there no actors? Are there actors and these are the ghosts of the characters? Do the people who don't die in the play have their own separate limbo space when their play isn't being performed? Is there Shakespeare-character-heaven? If this is a weird fake space where characters exist to be performed, wouldn't they not exist between performances? Who is at fault for their suffering: the patriarchy of their stories, Shakespeare, the patriarchy of Elizabethan England, the patriarchy of the current world that is performing their plays? I could really go on and on with these questions. The rules of the world were just vague and caused the arguments to struggle to land anywhere because there wasn't any grounded environment for anything to make sense in. I love a good suspension of disbelief, and am happy to accept a weird-limbo-character-space if there's literally any amount of thought to it but there was just nothing to grab onto here.)