Three Fallen Women

by Amy Guth

Amy Guth's violent and shimmering debut novel is the story of three women caught in the vortex of breaking down. For Helen,a painter reawakening after a long period of self-destruction, peace is the choice between the love of her life and her new-found freedom. For Carmen, addiction will define the final throes of her broken heart. And for Frieda, the perfect housewife, catharsis is defined by sex and murder.

Three Fallen Women unapologetically weaves graphic adventure with heartbreak and sweetness to fashion a new brand of fiction. Equal parts feminist battle cry, anti-love story, and twisted metamorphosis, this is a novel that refuses conventional storytelling and lands a hard suckerpunch in the gut of the patriarchy.

Amy Guth has garnered a solid reputation in indie-lit circles as a consistently dynamic and entertaining live performer. Her readings are nothing short of performance art spectacles, including audience participation, props, and a punk rock energy that always attracts a large and enthusiastic crowd. Her debut novel brings that same energy to print.

Genres: Fiction

200 pages, Paperback

First published October 2, 2006

About the author

Amy Guth has spent her career writing, telling and sharing important stories on multiple platforms. She’s an author, editor, journalist, broadcaster, award-winning screenwriter, and producer of films and events, and her work is sharply focused around making space for important stories that challenge narratives.

More at https://www.amyguth.com/about

Reviews

[Ben]

Amy is cracked in just the right way.

[Kirstyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

The narrative point of view was fantastic, granting the body a mind of its own if you will, things you would never expect to be represented in an anthropomorphic manner, several characters stories' collapsing into to one breakdown, both vivid and terrifying... I could go on and on, but Amy's words speak for themselves. In some ways,yes,this is certainly any anti-love story, but it would be cheap to categorize it as so. "Romance zipped in on threads and haunted you ...when you wanted not to be held, but just to lie next to another naked body in the dark and talk long after you both already knew enough about each other's life." I love that line, and don't see it as anti-love story but as realistic- a genuine love. I don't think love or loss of it can be described better. More than anything this novel hints at the notion of not settling. You have one life, if you settle in love, in career, you lose in a sense. You lose yourself too. Of course, that is just one of my interpretations. There are many more layers to this. Read it for yourself.

[James Vest · Rating 4 out of 5]

Three Fallen Women is a haunting fever dream, flickering between the ethereal and the lucid, from cynical darkness to wide-eyed truths.

[Jason Pettus · Rating 4 out of 5]

(My full review of this book is much longer than GoodReads' word-count limitations. Find the entire essay at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com].)

As a lot of CCLaP's readers are probably already aware, one of the first rules of artistic criticism is that the reviewer in question is never supposed to inject their personal lives into their essays, write in the first person, or other such things that unduly call attention to themselves; it's a rule I sometimes break here, specifically in the hopes of creating a more conversational and intimate relationship between you and me here at the site, although a rule as well that I try as much as possible to obey, because it's a good rule and there's a reason it exists. So what to make of a book, then, that deeply speaks to a reviewer and resonates with them, specifically because of it mirroring so much of their own real past? Do you convey some of that story to your readers, in the hopes that they understand more about why you enjoyed the book so much? Or do you stick to the "no personal stories" rule of artistic criticism, and maybe not ultimately convey what's so great about the book in question?

It's a subject that's come up with today's book, in fact, the black-as-coal Three Fallen Women by Chicago author Amy Güth, a novel that's going to terrify some of you while making others think, "My God, she's talking about me." Although deeply flawed in certain respects (but more on that in a bit), this look at three people who have hit rock-bottom in the past and are struggling to recover is going to profoundly resonate with a certain amount of people out there, undoubtedly a higher percentage here at CCLaP than among the general population; and what's more, it will resonate in a way that these people don't usually talk about in public, a dark way that reflects all the fears we have about ourselves on our worst days. It is a frustrating book, an addictive book, a book I seemingly can't stop thinking about even days after I've finished, even with all of its problems (and there are quite a few); it's a book that's sure to stir debate, no matter if that's a book club in question or your own inner brain in the middle of the night.

And in fact this is one of the first surprising things to learn about Three Fallen Women, of its extremely dark and intimate nature; and that's because...

[Téa Jones-Yelvington · Rating 3 out of 5]

Amy opts for a very interesting narrative voice here. Her narrator, omniscient, almost a deity, muses not only on the behaviors and psychological states of her three protags, but also on the intervention of the fates, metaphysics, the emotional life of characters' organs and cells, etc. Sometimes Amy's risks (which I totally respect and admire) pay off brilliantly, as with a powerful recurring image of the invisible psychic threads that literally crosscut our world. Other times, I found the narrator's all-knowingness alienated me a bit from the characters just when I wanted to feel closest to them. I'm personally not the biggest fan of big, declarative statements like "There is genuine strength in falling to ashes," "The need for things comes from a painful void," or "The body, despite how resilient we might feel most of the time, is actually quite a flimsy little factory," unless the statements seem to emerge organically in some way from characters' experiences and psychologies -- here they sometimes felt a bit overdetermined. I think this type of grand, almost mythological narration is one of the hardest things to pull off, and I really admire Amy for trying, and there is quite a bit about this text that I love.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

Once in a while there's a book that takes awesome characters and punk rock prose and blends the two into such an interesting story that it takes your breath away. This is one of those stories.

In my old age I'm finding that I like the indie-press liturature more because it's engaging, raw, and unapologetic.

Anyways, this story is about three women Helen, Carmen and Frida who are caught in their own vortex of breaking down. Amy Guth does a great job of plopping the reader into the midst of the action and explaining the back story in such a way you don't want to put the book down until you're done.

[Kristal · Rating 1 out of 5]

Three different vignettes are used to show how different women are caught in their own hell and how each one deals with the problem. While I am usually drawn to dark fiction, for me, this was just plain depressing. I felt no attachment to any of the characters, I thought the writing was scattered. If it wasn't for the fact that it was less than 160 pages, I would have performed a DTB (Ditch-the-you-know) early on. Not recommended for anyone I know.

[Canan]

I want to read this book but can't find it anywhere online!! I've asked So New Media if they'll ship to the Netherlands and got no answer, as for Amazon, it's out of stock... any idea how I could get it?

[Katie Schwartz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amy spins a yarn like nobody's business. She's exquisitely dark in all the right ways. Each character has heart and soul and purpose. If you haven't read it, READ IT.

[Elizabeth Rago · Rating 5 out of 5]

The life Amy brings to organs and blood and hearts made me gasp, questioning what my body was saying deep beneath my skin. Fantastic and ugly. My kinda read.

[Steven Beeber · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've heard this is great. Looking forward to reading it.