I enjoyed this a lot more than I was expecting. When i first saw the writing style, particularly with the way the dialogue is written, I wasn’t sure if I was going to gel with this but after the first few pages I got used to the style and it wasn’t too much of a bother.

I really enjoyed reading from the perspective of the child main character, though I do think she was written younger than her supposed age of 8. To me she came across more as around 6 years old. Experiencing the story from a child’s perspective made it so much creepier, and you truly feel the loss of innocence that comes with what Bela has to go through.

This was definitely creepy, though I disagree with a lot of reviewers who say it’s the scariest book they’ve ever read. It’s very baseline horror, which isn’t a bad thing! But definitely not the scariest book i’ve come across.

I’m not too sure how to feel about the ending. It felt very rushed and we end up with a lack of conclusion to the whole buildup of the story. Maybe i’m missing something, but it did leave me a little disappointed!

4.75 stars Such an important, informative and at times terrifying book! I read this via audiobook, which was narrated by the author and it was really easily digestible! This made me so angry about the state of the world, so many things are built with a male bias that I never even realised, and the fact that women are literally dying because of this has filled me with so much rage. I really recommend everyone reads this book, it will completely change your perspective of the world around you!

I found it really hard to rate this book. the premise was so fascinating but the execution wasn’t what i was hoping for. it may just be the translation, but the writing was really simple and repetitive, and i found it hard to get lost in the story because of that.

i was initially leaning towards a two star rating until i got to the third part of the book. experiencing Experiment City was so interesting and there was some really disturbing imagery throughout this section.

i really loved Earthlings by this author so i’m disappointed that i didn’t enjoy this one as much, but it was still really fascinating despite the lacklustre writing!

I found this to be very educational, though a little hard to digest at times. It was very clearly well researched but because it’s all coming from a scientific background, it’s a bit of a struggle to understand for a casual reader.

I really appreciate there being a book entirely focused on autism in women and girls, and I do think this is worth a read if you’re interested in learning more about it, particularly from a neuroscience perspective. I do wish there was more of a focus on actual autistic women’s perspectives, rather than just the occasional quote dropped in here and there, but there is a handy list of memoirs and autobiographies from autistic women at the end of this book which I will be making my way through!

I wasn’t too sure what to expect going into this. I imagined it may have a similar vibe to Horns by Joe Hill, but it was honestly like a generic crime novel with some horror and supernatural elements thrown in. I think the premise was really great, but the actual execution felt really rushed and a lot of opportunities to really dive into the horror aspect were missed.

I was really interested in the character of Katherine Moriarty, and I wish she’d been focused on more. The problem with constantly jumping perspectives in a novel is that you never really get to spend enough time with each character as you would like, and I think that was one of the main problems I had with this.

This was a fine book, but nothing outstanding or particularly special in my opinion.

This was one of my most anticipated reads on my TBR, so when my book club picked this as our book of the month, i was very excited! This didn’t go the way I was expecting, and to begin with I wasn’t sure if I was enjoying it, but the ending made this an instant 5 stars, and all I can say to anyone who isn’t sure if they’ll enjoy this, just trust the process because shit gets wild!

I’ve been quite interested in family vloggers and that whole industry for a while now, and that especially piqued when the whole 7 Passengers situation came out, and I think this perfectly depicted a lot of elements of that. I think we’ll see a lot of children come out in the future with their own stories of being exploited online by their parents, and I can imagine both Clementine and Mary’s paths will look similar to that.

All in all, great book!

so beautiful and raw. i was expecting this to be focused on the murder of the women as mentioned in the blurb, but it’s so much more than that. this is a story of sisterhood, addiction, grief and a life lost to a destiny that seems so out of your control. i felt connected to every character, and i’ll be thinking about their stories for a long time.

Very interesting and compelling read. I liked the wide range of perspectives included in this book, from government officials, to authors, to everyday activists, it gives you a well rounded look at the fight for women’s rights in modern day Scotland from a GC perspective. I listened on audio book and the narrator was very clear and concise, and the whole book was very easily digestible even when talking about some very tricky topics. Definitely recommend if you want to learn more about modern day feminism!

The premise of this really intrigued me and whilst it was relatively interesting, it didn’t capture me the way i expected it to. I found the jumping perspectives and timelines a little confusing to follow and though it was clearly well researched, the actual writing was very average. A fine read, but nothing amazing

As someone who is absolutely fascinated by ‘freaks’ and early 20th century circuses, this feels like it was specifically written for me. This had everything I wanted, from weird body horror to complicated familial relationships. I loved each character in their own ways, and this was so fantastical written! 100% recommend

This was the Difficult Women Book club read for June

Whilst I do understand what Laurie Penny was trying to convey with this book, I felt it was executed poorly. Everything felt very surface level, and the book could have done with being longer so there was more of a deeper look into each topic covered.

I have a specific problem with the chapter ‘Gender Capital’. For a book supposedly about the exploitation of the female body in society, there was a ridiculous amount of talk about how this flavour of misogyny apparently affects trans ‘women’. Women are not exploited because we present feminine or have feminine characteristics, we are exploited because we are female, and trans women do not experience that. I felt it was very poor taste to try and compare the choices trans women make to buy into the beauty and cosmetic surgery industry to the relentless pressure women experience from childhood to have to look and present an exact way to be considered even human. These are not comparable whatsoever and I don’t think a book about Female flesh under capitalism needs to have a whole section dedicated to Males.

Overall I found this to be a very one dimensional look into the topic, and wouldn’t recommend

I wasn’t sure how I felt about this book for the first 40% or so, but it definitely grew on me! I enjoyed Jade’s character, and I liked that she wasn’t the ‘final girl’ or a necessarily good person. It made her far more interesting.

I went into this pretty blind. I knew it was a slasher and the MC was horror obsessed, but other than that I didn’t know what to expect. I was pleasantly surprised once I really got into it. You want to keep reading to see what’s going to happen, and it’s pretty unpredictable! There’s definitely a lot of rather dark themes hidden within this that you may not expect just from the synopsis, but I think that made the story more well rounded and meaningful than your typical slasher.

Can’t wait to read the rest of this series!

3.75 stars

I did enjoy reading this, but it absolutely did not live up to what I expected it to be. Based on the synopsis, I was expecting a dark, gritty story about underground fetish clubs, but it really didn’t go as deep as I was anticipating. This was a lot more focused on Baby’s day to day life without her missing ex boyfriend, with occasional looks into her experiences with catering to fetishes. Definitely not as dark as I was expecting.

It was a fun read, but nothing special!

This was so beautifully written by oh my god was it heartbreaking. I found myself having to stop at certain points because it genuinely made me feel ill. There’s no holding back in this novel, you dive right into the sick mind of a middle aged man obsessed with a fourteen year old girl, and all the disgust you expect to come from that is definitely met.

This felt very reminiscent of Lolita, and would be a good companion to that if you wanted to read a similar story from different periods.

4.75 stars

This was the Difficult Women Book Club pick for May

I absolutely did not expect to enjoy this as much as I did! I’m always a bit cautious when going into contemporary fiction books as it’s not usually a genre i gravitate towards, but this absolutely exceeded my expectations! I found Margo to be a really lovable and fun to spend time with, and every character was interesting in their own way. The relationships in this book definitely stood out to me, particularly the relationship between Margo and her dad, and Margo and Susie. You can tell a lot of effort was put into making all the relationships thought out and full of emotion.

Though I personally am not a fan of the way this book does glamorise sex work, and I definitely think the authors opinion of it comes from a privileged and slightly uneducated perspective, it was still enjoyable to read about the Only Fans experience from Margo’s perspective.

This was a lot more emotional than I expected, and I absolutely love when a book takes me by surprise like this one did!

I was surprised to see so many low ratings of this book because i personally found it very well written and a beautifully haunting story!

If this hadn’t been my book club’s read for this month, I definitely would have DNF’ed after the first few chapters. There was nothing inherently bad about this book, but I found it incredibly boring and repetitive. None of the characters were very likeable, the writing felt very flat and the story just dragged on. The concept is interesting, but it just wasn’t executed very well in my opinion. If there had been more focus on the crime side of the plot, rather than just never ending monologues about Hana’s obsession with money, I probably would have enjoyed it a lot more.

Kind of conflicted on how I feel about this book. It was clearly very well researched, and I liked how it covered multiple aspects of pop culture throughout the 90s and 00s, but I feel like the author was rather wish-washy with her opinions at times. A large chunk of this speaks about the harm pornography does to women and girls, both within the women who perform it and the general public, but then Gilbert goes on to say she has no problem with pornography, and that confused me. How can you have all this information about how horrific the treatment of women is in porn, along with how negatively it has impacted our culture, and still say you have no issue with it? This is one of the problems I have with ‘sex work positive’ feminism. It preaches ‘listen to sex workers!!!’ but when said sex workers discuss how damaging sex work and pornography was to them, it covers its ears because it doesn’t fit the narrative of the happy prostituted woman. The information and proof is all out there for us to see, but it seems only very few feminists actually want to speak out on how dangerous this recent sex work positivity is.

I had a few other issues with this, such as the discussions of the harmfulness of women overperforming femininity but then the author praises trans women for doing the same thing and almost phrases it in a way that they’re doing it better and more progressively than cis women that I found rather distasteful, and also how there wasn’t much focus on the effect of the 90s and 00s misogyny on lesbian women, particularly when it came to pornography and the depictions of lesbianism in the kinds of comedy movies the author spoke about.

However, I do still think this is a good read, especially if you’re interested in both feminism and pop culture.

I really loved this, far more than I ever expected to! It has everything I love, the 1970s, witchcraft, feminism, and female rage, and it often reminded me of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.

For a book about pregnancy and misogyny written by a man, this was clearly very well researched and handled with a lot of care. There’s no sugarcoating, the depictions of pregnancy and birth are realistically horrific, and I can tell Grady Hendrix put a lot of effort into treating this topic with the respect it deserves.

I think this could one day be considered a classic within horror, on the same wavelength as Rosemary’s Baby, and I highly recommend it to new and seasoned horror readers!