#female rage book recommendations

[ellapastoral]

[motherearthlovesus]

femcel literature for middle aged women????

i need help with a book recommendation for my mum - she was the one to first give me 'the bell jar', she went to communist camp when she was a teenage and is a huge feminist. basically who is the sylvia plath of middle aged women?

[demure-ladys-library]

I really want to learn about Ethel Cain's Lore but I'm scared nor ready to so please recommend some sacrilegious books so I could prepare my mind with even more mental torture I'll put myself into :))

[justanothershitbagcivilian]

If you guys want to read a book about a somewhat relatable unhinged lonely woman with mommy AND daddy issues that’s unhealthily obsessed with an emotionally unavailable man you should read “if I can’t have you” by charlotte levin.

[hotchocolatelovesyou]

Do you have guys have any recommendations about Greek mythology books in which the female lead can be used as an example for the female rage? I've read Circe by Madeline Miller and The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood, but I need more. There are many titles that seem interesting but I'm not sure.

It's for my thesis :)

[thebellekeys]

– Johanna van Veen, My Darling Dreadful Thing

[aplpaca]

there are few things more unappealing to me than the popular idea/aesthetic of "female rage". like partly bc of the slavish gender conformity of it but also like. it's literally just rage. everyone has it. grow a spine and just be angry instead of making it about "the universal female condition" or whatever bullshit.

[n0namey]

A CERTAIN HUNGER – CHELSEA G. SUMMERS

if patrick bateman and hannibal lecter had a daughter

5/5 ★★★★★

[thehorrormaven]

ARC Review: A Female Rage Bonanza Not for the Squeamish

The Eyes Are the Best Part by Monika Kim Release Date: June 25, 2024 Synopsis Feminist psychological horror about the making of a female serial killer from a Korean-American perspective. Ji-won’s life tumbles into disarray in the wake of her appa’s extramarital affair and subsequent departure. Her mother, distraught. Her younger sister, hurt and confused. Her college freshman grades, failing.…

[1-million-interests]

My Favourite Book of the 2023 - CHOUETTE

Chouette (2021 - also French for 'owl') by Claire Oshetsky is one of the best books I have ever read. Any one who knows me knows that I am a fan of all things 'female-rage', particularly anything involving women embracing their primality through paralleling their lives with animals (shoutout to my favourite book of 2022; Nightbitch). Not only that, but I am a sucker for fantasy-realism. There is truly nothing better than reading a book where nothing is certain and reality is a dream-like blur and thinking "ok... what the fuck is going on". This thought completely encompasses my entire journey through Chouette.

The plot follows a woman named Tiny, who after having a dream in which she is making love to a female owl, finds herself pregnant. Upon giving birth to this half owl half human baby we learn that it has sever physical and psychological defects, with its appearance and behaviour resembling that of an owl. While Tiny loves and embraces her owlet, her husband, who Tiny refers to as a "dog-person", only sees it as a problem that needs to be fixed, attempting to strip it of all bird-like qualities so that it may join him and his pack of dog-family. Now you can see why I had no clue what the fuck was going on.

While my recounting of the plot may seem absurd and confusing and too complicated to bother reading, I assure you that this is where most of the joy from reading the text comes from. What starts as merely a stream of consciousness spiel that serves to create the world of the text as it exists in reality slowly turns into a whirlwind of dreams and hallucinations and paranormal experiences and synesthesia that leaves the reader having to determine for themselves what is "real" and what is only occurring in Tiny's mind. The absolute peak of this, for me, would be when Tiny gives birth to Chouette and her birth defects are described, both through the way Tiny sees and describes her, and how the adults in the text (Tiny's husband, in-laws, day-care owners, etc.) react to her appearance and behaviour. What Tiny describes as a beak, her husband describes as the absence of a nose, and when Chouette screeches, her father only hears a scream. Trying to create a complete image of Chouette in your mind is such a difficult, horrifying, and thrilling task, and this book will have you trying to wrap your head around reality as it exists to Tiny's husband until you just give up and embrace Tiny's reality (because honestly, it's much more fun).

One of the most spectacular aspects of the book for me is Tiny's connection to music. Tiny herself is a concert cellist and slowly begins to love her career and love of the instrument after giving birth to Chouette. Frequently throughout the novel Oshetsky references classical symphonies that are familiar to Tiny (while also having an index of all the music mentioned in chronological order at the beginning of the book in case the reader wants to listen along) as music she has either played or enjoyed. This music always relates to Tiny's present state of mind or the situation around her. Personally, I love when authors relate the female experience to the art they create (which can also be seen in my favourite book in the whole world; Cat's Eye) and how it becomes an extension of their subconscious desires. You'll have to read the book to fully understand how Oshetsky uses it because it truly is captivating.

One criticism I have of Chouette is its characterisation of Tiny. While she is our narrator and one of the few characters in the book with a name, her behaviour is still quite 2-dimensional. If you read the book you'll get what I mean. It seems that at times she is annoyingly submissive, allowing everyone to call her Tiny (which might not even be her real name!) and poke fun at how she's just this sensitive little woman who's going through a bit of post-partum stress and is really nothing to worry about why she couldn't even hurt a fly! However, instead of feeling empowered by her second-hand primality that she receives from her owl-baby and the maternal strength and love she feels she continues to remain painfully submissive, even when her husband attempts to covert her bird into a dog. There were honestly so many moments in this text where I felt like picking up Tiny by her shoulders, giving her a hard shake, and telling her to man the fuck up. For a book that centers entirely around Tiny's descent into delusion, desire, depression and anger, there really should be a point where she breaks out of this stereotypically gentle female role, takes charge, and protects her baby, no matter the cost.

In conclusion, if you are a fan of feminism and magical realism then this is the book for you. The blended parallel between women and animals is such a unique and intriguing approach to feminism and female rage as it touches on the darker sides of the female experience that audiences and authors tend to stay away from. This harsh and subversive take on maternal love, the female experience, and the feminine response and connection to nature and animals is a riveting read and absolutely wins the title of my favourite book of the year.

I can't wait to find my woman gone feral book of 2024.

[livdianbooks]

Review: Animal

I knew it from the first few pages of Lisa Taddeo’s Animal: this is a book that you feel. The sorta book that’s painful to swallow down, and then you feel it still sitting in your gut hours later.

Joan, our main character, has had a life of repeated trauma, largely caused by the men around her. Now, at 36, she uses her sex-appeal to her advantage, but she is continually used by men in turn. When…

[monstrousgourmandizingcats]

Some books and stories that I think are worth reading in conversation with Yellowjackets

Shirley Jackson, all works but especially The Sundial, The Haunting of Hill House, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Jackson might or might not need any introduction in this fandom. The Sundial is her take on doomsday preppers, Hill House is of course her haunted house novel (one of the classics of that genre), and Castle has a female protagonist who makes Shauna look like a plaster saint.

Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear It Away. O'Connor's work has some of the most pervasive darkness and brutality of any major American writer (maybe Ambrose Bierce comes close), and the second of two novels that she completed before her death is no exception. (The first, Wise Blood, is also very good; the intended third, Why Do the Heathen Rage?, only exists as a fragmentary short story.) Francis Marion Tarwater is kidnapped and raised in the woods by his great-uncle, who is convinced that Francis is destined to be a prophet. The great-uncle's death commences a bizarre adventure involving auditory hallucinations, sinister truckers, an evil social worker, arson, developmental disabilities, and baptizing and drowning someone at the same time. Content warnings for all of the above plus rape. O'Connor is also a fairly racist author by today's standards--she was a white Southerner who died in 1964--so keep that in mind as well.

Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness. Teenage protagonist is schizophrenic and also a channel for a genuinely supernatural force; well-intentioned but poorly-considered efforts to treat one of these issues make the other worse. Sound familiar? There are supporting characters who are affectionate parodies of Slavoj Zizek and Marie Kondo. A minor character is a middle-aged lesbian who cruises dating apps for hookups with much younger women. Some people find this book preachy and overwritten, but I really like it and would plug it even if I didn't because the author is someone whom I've met and who has been supportive of my own writing.

Yukio Mishima, The Decay of the Angel. Can be read in translation or in the original Japanese. This is the fourth and last book in a series called The Sea of Fertility but I wouldn't necessarily recommend the first three as particularly YJ-ish; Decay is because it deals at great length with issues of doubt and ambiguity about whether or not a genuinely held, but personally damaging, spiritual and religious belief is true. There's also more (as Randy Walsh would put it) lezzy stuff than is usual for Mishima, a gay man. Content warnings for elder abuse, sexual abuse of both children and vulnerable adults in previous books in the series, forced abortion in the first book if you decide to read the whole thing from the beginning, and the fact that in addition to being a great novelist the author was also a far-right political personality.

Howard Frank Mosher, Where the Rivers Flow North. An elderly Vermont lumberjack and his Native American common-law wife refuse to sell their land to a development company that wants to build a hydroelectric power plant. Tragedy ensues. I haven't read this one in a long time but some images from the movie stick in my mind as YJ-y. Lots of fire, water, and trees.

Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers. Yes, this is the same Leonard Cohen who later transitioned into songwriting and became a household name in that art form. Beautiful Losers is a very weird, very horny novel that he wrote as a young man; it deals with the submerged darkness and internal tension within Canadian and specifically Quebecois society. One of the main characters is Kateri Tekakwitha, a seventeenth-century Iroquois convert to Catholicism who was probably a lesbian in real life (although Cohen unfortunately seems unaware of this). This one actually shows up YJ directly; the song "God Is Alive, Magic Is Afoot" that plays in the season 2 finale takes its lyrics from a particularly strange passage.

Monica Ojeda, Jawbone. Can be read in translation or in the original Spanish. Extremely-online teenage girls at a posh bilingual Catholic high school in Ecuador start their own cult based on such time-honored fodder as Herman Melville novels, internet creepypasta (no, this book does not look or feel anything like Otherside Picnic), and their repressed but increasingly obvious desire for one another. The last part in particular gets the attention of their English teacher, whose own obsessive internalized homophobia grows into one of the most horrifying monstrous versions of itself I've ever read. Content warning for just about everything that could possibly imply, but especially involuntary confinement, religious and medical abuse, and a final chapter that I don't even know how to describe. Many thanks to @maryblackwood for introducing me to this one.

Jorge Luis Borges, lots of his works but especially "The Aleph," "The Cult of the Phoenix," and "The South." Can be read in translation or in the original Spanish. The three works I list are all short stories. The first deals with mystical experiences and the comprehensibility (or lack thereof) of the universe, the second with coded and submerged references to sexuality in general and homosexuality in particular, the third with leaving your well-appointed city home for a ranch in the middle of nowhere and almost immediately dying in a knife fight, which is surely a very YJ series of things to do.

H.P. Lovecraft, "The Colour out of Space," "The Dunwich Horror," "The Dreams in the Witch House," and "The Thing on the Doorstep." Lovecraft in general needs no introduction--the creepiness, the moroseness, the New Englandness, the purple heliotrope prose, his intense racism (recanted late in life but not in time to make any difference in his reception history) and the way his work reflects his fear of the Other. These short stories are noteworthy for having settings that are more woodsy and less maritime than is usual for Lovecraft's New England, for overtones of the supernatural rather than merely the alien, for featuring some of his few interesting female characters, and for their relative lack of obvious racial nastiness. Caveat lector nevertheless.

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick. It's Moby-Dick. Once you realize that Captain Ahab is forming a cult around the whale and his obsession with it you can't unrealize it.

[eternal-echoes]

“Testosterone also wreaks havoc on a woman's emotions. One YouTuber named Gibby remarked, "Being on testosterone has made me cry less. I wish I could cry right now, but it's not going to happen."(10) Some infer from this that testosterone helps to ease depression, but a woman's inability to process emotions is not a sign of improved mental health. Because testosterone boosts confidence, some who receive the drug might feel that their challenges in life have lessened. One woman noted, "It puts a Band-Aid on all of your problems for a while until you realize that it hasn't fixed anything.”(11) Keira Bell recalled that while she was taking testosterone, "I couldn't release my emotions." But when she halted the hormonal treatments, she noted, "One of the first signs that I was becoming Keira again was that-thankfully, at last—I was able to cry. And I had a lot to cry about."(12)

While some women who take testosterone don't experience these side effects, many do. Helena Kerschner believed that testosterone would be the right choice for her, but discontinued the injections and recalled:

I would have like such overwhelming rage attacks that I actually would end up hurting myself instead of hurting others because I was just so out of control. I couldn't control myself. I felt like a monster ... before I was on testosterone when I would have a really strong emotion, it might move me to tears and I would just cry and sob. But while I was on testosterone, I lost the ability to cry very easily. So I would get that intense emotion but there would be no outlet and then for one reason or another that would trigger anger. I would get so angry and frustrated and that anger was just so overwhelming. And I got the urge to really externalize it. I got the urge to hit things or throw things. I just didn't want to do that. I felt so out of control that I would just kind of take it out on myself to calm myself down and to be an outlet for that rage.(13)

Because these side effects were so troubling, she scaled back on her use of testosterone. Reflecting on how the promises she heard about transitioning weren't materializing, she said, "This is not matching up to that fantasy I had as a teenager. As a teenager I was kind of promised, you know, like this is going to save your life. This is going to make you feel authentic. This is going to make you your true self. This is going make you so happy...It's trans joy."(14)

-Jason Evert, Male, Female, or Other: A Catholic Guide to Understanding Gender

—

Work cited:

10) "Trans vs Conservative Men: Is Masculinity Disappearing in America?, Middle Ground," https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=376432230764656

11) "Biological Woman's Hour-Keira Bell," https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6X530mxSA (This book was published in 2022 but the video is no longer available in YouTube). 12) Keira Bell, "Keira Bell: My Story," Persuasion, April 7, 2021, https://www.persuasion. community/p/keira-bell- my-story.

13) "A Story of Detransitioning, Michael Knowles Interview," https://youtu.be/5HbPz]y9gkY.

14) “A Story of Detransitioning.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HbPzJy9gkY&t=9s&ab_channel=MichaelKnowles

—

For more recommended resources on gender dysphoria, click here.

[alightcaseofohno]

Why is it that when I try to find books about male victims, they're always from the perspective of women and marketed by women on things like pinterest and tiktok as "female rage" books?

I want a story about a vulnerable male victim.

Not a story about an angry woman. I'm sick of female rage lit, it feels like every book I'm recommended now is female rage lit.

[ladyniniane]

Finished reading Ionna Papadopoulou's Winter Harvest and it's one of the best retellings of Greek mythology I've read so far (and if the genre can offer some very good books, but also plenty of mediocre ones).

I was really in reading this one because : 1) It's about Demeter (one of my favorite goddesses) 2) It was written by a Greek author.

I enjoyed the portrayal of Demeter as a loving mother but also a complex, powerful and flawed woman. It's about a goddess who can both create and destroy. It's about embracing your monstrous side. It's about female rage. It's about seizing your agency and carving a place for yourself.

When authors write about maligned mythological figures, they sometimes turn them into saints, removing all of their edges and making them faultless and perfect (I'm thinking about Kaikeyi and Lilith).

This wasn't the case here. Demeter is a deeply flawed individual (and the narrative is very close to the original myths here. She's a goddess with all that it entails). But her grief feels real and palpable, allowing us to understand her fully.

I'm also grateful to read a retelling where Demeter isn't the villain (I hate these)! Because if you turn a woman who, in the original myth, challenges the gods and the established order to save her daughter from a rapist into an abusive villain, I'm not going to agree with you. (Especially as mothers are always held to impossible standards both in fiction and real life while fathers are praised for doing the bare minimum).

Here, both Demeter and Persephone have the same duality, complexity and agency.

Reading it made me angry sometimes. It pulls no punches regarding patriarchal violence. The thought that goddesses also suffer from all this and that their lot isn't very different from mortal women in that regard is a depressing one. But not everything is bleak and it shows women fighting back and succeeding.

I really recommend it !

[sad-boys-book-club]

"&" Ampersand - A Literary Companion: Eve & Paradise Lost

Hey everyone!

Let’s continue feeding my unhealthy obsession with Bastille by diving into the literary companion I created for “&”. Today, we’re talking about the second track: Eve & Paradise Lost. (Now that the album is out, I can finally follow the tracklist properly!)

In case you missed it, here’s my post about Intros & Narrators.

Before we jump into the book picks for this song, I want to apologize for the delay in writing this. I’ve had some family stuff going on, moved houses and also wanted to make sure I had read both books before recommending them.

Actually, I plan to take some time to go over the whole list of stories I’ve picked—I want to read them all thoroughly so I know exactly what I’m recommending to you all (some of them, I've already read, but I want to revisit them as well).

Now, let’s talk about the song. I find it fascinating to see a male songwriter like Dan taking on a woman’s perspective for a project that explores different stories. The official statement about the song stood out to me: “This song is about the burdens of loving women cruelly made to feel blame and shame from the dawn of time.” It’s clear Dan’s an artist who engages with feminist writings, and that’s something I truly appreciate—especially given how rare it is in the music industry, particularly for someone who presents as a straight, white male.

Cat Bohannon — Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

The title character from the song. Probably the most cited figure from the Bible. A staple in paintings and literature for the past two thousand years. The first sinner. Eve remains a pillar of the Western collective imagination, her meaning changing a lot throughout the decades. From the representation of female sexual desire, scapegoating her for condemning the entire human race to death by eating the forbidden fruit (can you tell I went to Catholic school?), to being seen as the first example of female rage in the face of oppression. She embodies the complexities of womanhood—temptation, sin, and defiance—all wrapped into a single character.

Cat Bohannon’s book couldn’t be further from this. With a PhD from Columbia in the evolution of narrative, Bohannon explores why, in an age when we often see medical and science knowledge as some sort of truth, we still somehow have a very male-centric view of the human body.

By reexamining all the different potential Eves we have in the history of human evolution—that’s how she chooses to call all the ‘hypothetical female ancestors’ in our shared Homo sapiens lineage—, Bohannon urges us to reconsider and reshape our understanding of how our knowledge of the human body has often ignored half the world’s population.

As someone who enjoys reading non-fiction books (happy to share a few of my all-time favorites in the comments to whoever is interested), I found this book a really insightful, at times infuriating, eye-opening view into how sad it is that, for much of documented history, women have been seen as just men with breasts and wombs bolted on. The author is especially conscious of how sex (influenced by chromosomes, physiology, and hormones) and gender (how we identify, behave in our environment, and interact with one another) are not the same thing. She often adds notes to point out how science ignoring the female body and all its narratives has even worse consequences for trans and nonbinary folks, which I found really well-done and necessary in today’s age.

I picked this book as a companion to the song mainly because of the “rolled your eyes at pain you'll never comprehend” line, but I think it is a solid read on its own. I certainly learned a lot about my own body during the 15 hours I listened to the audiobook.

John Milton — Paradise Lost

So, Paradise Lost—the epic poem that pops up on pretty much every English Lit syllabus. Quick and snappy plot summary before we dive in: It’s a 12-part epic that covers Satan’s dramatic fall from Heaven, the creation of Adam and Eve, their blissful (but short-lived) days in Eden, the infamous temptation, and their ultimate eviction from paradise. Along the way, there’s a war in Heaven (didn’t exactly keep me on the edge of my seat), plus some deep philosophical chats between Raphael and Adam about creation, God, and, well, everything. It’s basically theological fanfiction (I mean it in the most neutral way possible).

Milton, being the good Puritan he was, used these stories to dig into free will, predestination, and conscience. It’s hard not to see Satan as a rebel leader and God as the authority figure, especially when you remember Milton was writing during the English Civil War. 

The poem was widely known but highly controversial and criticized during Milton’s lifetime, however, during the Romantic period, poets like Shelley and Byron “reclaimed” Milton’s Satan as a tragic antihero figure.

Anyway, I had to dig out my old uni notes (and hit up some audiobooks) to brush up on Eve’s role in this whole mess. And let me tell you, there’s a lot to unpack. Mainly because: a) as is often the case with old poetry, there’s a lot to read between the lines; b) classics come with a million different interpretations, and c) there are a few different versions, depending on the edition you read, so it’s easy to get lost in the variations of text, footnotes, and commentaries. (And also d) I won’t lie, it’s a slow, heavy read. At times, I had to resort to the audiobook just to get through some of the passages!)

Here’s what stood out this time around: Eve’s role is seriously hard to pin down, as Milton's relation to gender politics has been scrutinized since, well, pretty much since it was published in the 17th century. (Yeah, I had to pull out good old Google Scholar, watch some lectures on YouTube, and, of course, dive into Muses: An Ampersand Podcast—thanks, Dan and, mostly, Emma.)

What I really enjoyed was reading some modern articles that analyze Eve’s character through the lens of feminism which ties into the song’s exploration of blame and shame—no Wild World pun intended.

First of all, when Eve is introduced to Adam in Paradise Lost, Milton has her momentarily distracted by her own reflection in a pool of water, a subtle but significant parallel to the myth of Narcissus (hint hint). It’s an early indication of how susceptible to being misled she will be later on. But it also plays into this idea that her curiosity and desire—whether for knowledge or just, you know, herself—are somehow “dangerous.”

Now, Eve gets the blame for the Fall because she’s tempted by Satan to snack on the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. Sure, she’s tricked, but let’s not pretend it’s all the serpent’s fault—once the idea is planted, it’s Eve who talks herself (and Adam) into it. That shows some sense of agency on her part, right? She wasn’t just a passive, helpless victim; she wanted to prove herself, to be tested, and she took action.

Milton is giving her a bit of credit for having a mind of her own, even if it’s wrapped up in this narrative of downfall. Eve’s curiosity and independence—qualities we might admire today—become her so-called "fatal flaws" here. So, yes, the story punishes female agency, but it’s undeniably there. And in a world where women were (and still are) often written as powerless, it’s refreshing to see Eve at least take some control, even if the outcome is a bit... unfortunate.

Now, let’s be real, this whole negative portrayal of Eve isn’t shocking. Milton was writing in a time where misogyny was baked into pretty much everything (which, sadly, isn’t all that different from now). Eve’s agency and sexuality are framed as the ultimate cautionary tale: women’s sexuality and agency are seen as inherently dangerous and something that inevitably leads to moral fallings.

But despite it all, towards the later part of Paradise Lost, Eve does get a kind of redemption arc. I came across one scholar who referred to the concept of felix culpa, a phrase in Catholic tradition meaning "happy fault" or "blessed fall." Eve might be responsible for humanity’s downfall, but her actions also set the stage for the coming of Christ, making her "mistake" a necessary part of the larger divine plan. It’s a bit of a paradox—how can something so disastrous lead to something so positive?—but the idea is that certain misfortunes can eventually lead to greater good.

Milton leans into this in Book 12, where Adam says:

"O goodness infinite, Goodness immense! That all this good of evil shall produce, And evil turn to good; more wonderful Than that which creation first brought forth, Light out of Darkness!"

So, in a roundabout way, Eve’s fall isn’t all doom and gloom—she’s the necessary catalyst that sets God's plan into motion. In fact, scholars have started to reframe Eve’s role in Paradise Lost as something more empowering than it initially appears. Traditionally, Eve’s been seen as the ultimate cautionary tale, blamed for humanity’s fall and cast as a symbol of female weakness and danger. But if you look closely, there’s something subversive in the way she’s actually the mover of the entire plot.

Eve isn’t just sitting around passively following orders—she actively makes the decision to eat the fruit, which, yes, brings about the fall, but it’s also what triggers the eventual coming of Christ and the possibility of redemption. Without her action, we’d all be hanging out in Eden, stuck in a static, sheltered existence. In a way, this is Eve taking control of her fate, making a choice, even if it’s framed as "wrong."

Plus, while Milton definitely punishes Eve, her agency is undeniable. Adam is kind of an afterthought in the whole thing—Eve is the one who steps outside the box, embraces curiosity, and disrupts the status quo. To modern feminist readers, that kind of defiance (even if it’s punished) reflects the strength of a woman asserting her independence. Raphael even calls her "the mother of humankind," acknowledging her dual role. She is both chaos and creation—a symbol of disruption but also the source of life. So, in a way, Eve’s choice is what makes humanity... well, human.

I like how in the song, there’s also a sense of Eve having an agency and a mind of her own. The chorus highlights Eve’s struggle with the idea of being “made for” Adam—“When they say I was made for you... made from you”—and the frustration of biting her tongue, which relates to how her love for Adam intertwines with her need for independence.

That’s it for this post! I’ll be back soon with more book picks for the next track. Let me know if you’ve read these or if you have any thoughts!

Feel free to share your thoughts and any other book suggestions as well!

With love,

Cat