#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 :))

[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 :)

[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.

[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.

[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.

[steelycunt]

i feel like "female rage" is so shallow... but then again euripidies medea is genuienly like oh there IS something here about being so hurt Because you are a woman that murder becomes the only answer but i think the very like. commune history part of greek tragedies were they were thought out as a community ritual (one participated only by men tho) gave it a transcendence that most of the modern types of female rage stories idk... they just dont have... and frankly euripidies had a rlly incredible grip on the psyche of his characters that even among his peers was unparalleled imo. maria callas was soso good as medea btw truly one of the most impactful performances in the history of cinema

i cannot speak to anything about greek tragedies or the place of a concept like female rage within them because that is just something i know less than nothing about lol, but my encounters with the concept today make me very much hate it. im very dubious about the ways and people who employ it but without getting into a longwinded discussion abt that, in literary terms purely of the rise of 'female rage' 'unhinged women' as a de facto book genre i find it very irritating. often because the books simply arent good, and for the ones that are i find it quite reductive and a bit insulting to slap one of those labels on them when generally theyre either doing a whole lot more than that or nothing at all. often because whats categorised as an 'unhinged woman' is just a woman in terrible circumstances or suffering from severe depression or mental health issues or dealing with grief and im uncomfortable with the idea that after interacting with something like that people (and usually women to be honest) frame it without a second thought as haha unhinged women. crazy women. feral women. do you see how close we are to returning to hahahah women are HYSTERICAL. for example my year of rest and relaxation which isnt a book i particularly enjoyed is just about a severely depressed woman why is fucking bookstagram marketing it to me as omg books about feral unhinged women!! bow emoji!! and i think its a discomfort that is parallel to my own and lot of peoples dislike of the whole coquette thing. but yeah haha most of my response isn't really in direct conversation with most of what youve raised i appreciate, largely because i dont know much about the greek theatre side of things so its just become a bit of a rant, but all of the problems with it aside my main observation in the original post is just that its sort of staggering how the books that are given this title are almost always bad. its almost a signal that a book will be bad if someone recommends it to you under this banner.

[bookshelvesandtealeaves]

✨ BOOK REVIEW ✨

Hungerstone by Kat Dunn

⭐️⭐️⭐️.5

[instagram]

Thank you Zando and Netgalley for providing me with an e-ARC of this in exchange for an honest review.

This book was so haunting and atmospheric. The prose was beautiful, the pace slow but simmering with anticipation. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this one.

I’ve not read Carmilla, so I have no idea what’s been borrowed and what hasn’t, but this book really stands strong on its own. I love me some sapphic vampires, and I absolutely love a revenge story. The female rage was palpable by the end of this book and I was enraptured.

I struggled to really connect with the characters on any kind of emotional level, which is the only reason this isn’t rated higher. I still thoroughly enjoyed this book.

I definitely recommend for fans of historical horror and gothic classics.

[battyaboutbooksreviews]

🏰 fantasy tag 🏰

I was lucky enough to receive an ARC of A Language of Dragons by S. F. Williamson YESTERDAY & stayed up all night yesterday. In celebration of the amazing fantasy books that keep us up past our bedtime, let's try this fantasy challenge. I'm tagging a few friends & new followers, but if you see this, answer one of the prompts below!

🏰 Your favorite fantasy series to recommend: 🌙 The Wrath & the Dawn - Renée Ahdieh 🌙 An Ember in the Ashes + Heir - Sabaa Tahir 🌙 Sands of Arawiya + A Tempest of Tea - Hafsah Faizal

💜 Your favorite fantasy book couples: 🌙 Shahrzad & Khalid 🌙 Zafira & Nasir 🌙 Feyre & Rhysand

⚔️ Your favorite fantasy tropes: 🌙 Second chance enemies to lovers 🌙 Found family 🌙 Female rage

📜 Your favorite fantasy series with immersive world-building: 🌙 An Ember in the Ashes + Heir - Sabaa Tahir 🌙 Spice Road - Maiya Ibrahim 🌙 Girls of Paper & Fire - Natasha Ngan

⚔️ Your favorite fantasy books with pretty covers: 🌙 Spice Road - Maiya Ibrahim 🌙 A Tempest of Tea - Hafsah Faizal 🌙 Strange the Dreamer - Laini Taylor

💜 Fictional fantasy worlds I would like to visit: 🌙 The Night Court 🌙 Maresh Empire/Red London

🏰 Fantasy books on my TBR: 🌙 A Fate Inked in Blood - Danielle L. Jensen 🌙 When the Moon Hatched - Sarah A. Parker 🌙 Bone Smith - Nicki Pau Preto

[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.