Banshee

by Rachel DeWoskin

A former pleaser, newly enraged poet/professor Samantha Baxter burns her polite life to the ground.

By turns heart-wrenching, uncomfortable, and hilarious, Banshee explores the internal monologue and actions of a woman who, upon being diagnosed with cancer, tumbles head-first into a midlife crisis and decides to be unapologetic about it. Banshee is a critical addition to the feminist canon, giving the reader a dramatized glimpse into what happens when women step outside of society's rules and expectations as wives, mothers, and working professionals--and instead choose to behave the way men do on a day-to-day basis.

Banshee is an excellent read

Feminist readers and book clubs Fans of dark comedy and finding humor amidst grief People who have received a life-threatening diagnosis Fans of Rachel DeWoskin's Big Girl Small and Michelle Tea's mordant sense of humor Furious middle-aged women Poets and especially poetry professors

Genres: Fiction, LGBT, Queer, Feminism, Contemporary, Literary Fiction

293 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 4, 2019

About the author

Rachel DeWoskin is the author of Foreign Babes in Beijing, a memoir about her inadvertent notoriety as the star of a Chinese soap opera, and a novel, Repeat After Me. She lives in New York City and Beijing and is at work on her fourth book, Statutory.

Reviews

[Mikala · Rating 2 out of 5]

I went from thinking this would be a new fave to skimming. Theres some relevant gems but a lot of repetitive mom guilt that wasn't for me.

To start I was really liking this and it felt very subversive. Also, this book, which has a strong plot point about cheating, did not feel shallow for some reason... The mc felt so real and empathizeable. At least in the beginning.

-"Was it possible that I had never read a female character as disgusting as I was turning out to be".... phenomenal 👏
-"I got to be every version of myself I'd ever been. But no body's wife or mother" (pertaining to how this lesbian affair made the mc feel)

Wow also loved the commentary on sexual harassment from male professors.

Repression and rebellion and finally allowing the rage and rebellion to bubble up in crisis.

I think this was the first moment it started to lose me. They are a very privileged family paying their kids way through life. Upper middle class. It started to feel like a POV that I couldn't empathize with.

Then came the nail in the coffin for me....the mom guilt. I wished she was truly no f's given and truly went for it. I would have found that so much more interesting to read about.

Okay after a third of the book, when my rose colored glasses faded, I could see just how CHEESY the writing was..."now she would burn the patriarchy down" lol stop (-the mc mom speaking on her adult daughter and remembering her being small and now thinking of her in college).

It was the most annoying to me that the mc wouldn't tell her daughter about Leah....or think her daughter can't know a thing, and went to every extreme to make sure her daughter couldn't find out about it. (but she went through zero effort to make sure her husband wouldn't know)

I wish the author would have leaned all the way into the problematic, repulsive character archetype and not tried to redeem her character by the end of the book. It felt wishy-washy, and disjointed. Also boring.

Theres some relevant gems but a lot of mush and it's so SLOW.

It doesn't feel empowered because she's heinously guilty ridden. Also, it feels so rambling. What's the point.
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Synopsis: Banshee is narrated by Samantha, a professor of poetry who has been married for 19 years and has an adult daughter. After receiving a recent breast cancer diagnosis and having a surgery on the horizon she descends into terror and starts to implode her own life. She begins an affair with her younger female student.

[Tammy V · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love the writing in this book, and the "inside the head" voice of the protagonist is dead on.

The story is about an English professor who teaches poetry (and thinks in words - lots of associations - which seems unaffected and natural to me. I loved it), finds she has breast cancer, as did her mother who is still alive, and goes off the deep end, dragging everyone with her.

Our protagonist is less than perfect. Interestingly, I kept thinking what if she were a man, would she have to pay for her actions? She thinks that too, on more than one occasion. You have to read the book to find out, and I wonder in the end if this is the same as all-women-who-step-outside-the-norm fiction. Somehow DeWoskin has managed to make me think not, has left me with a lot of things to think about.

I ordered two of her other books the library has. If I weren't on buying hiatus, I'd buy this one because of the writing in it!

Excerpts:
"I ran faster, my heart bracing against my chest, the back wall, the front wall, the cancer maybe bouncing inside wall-to-wall, this time like a superball, pinball, beach ball. Think, I reminded myself, of outside things, I began to count the trees I ran by: endless, thought the rush of them helped calm me down. Trunk, trunk, trunk, branches branches leaves, Sam, breathe. I ran uphill to the edge of the park, then down a hill Alexi used to sled down, of the kids called Demon's Dive. I used to clip Alexi's mittens to a bright pink parka Hank's wife Sarah bought her, then put her on my lap in the blue plastic sled....

I stopped running and made my way slowly along the grass, ewer trees now and several other runners. I said, "You're not scared" to myself, instead of, "I'm not scared." Neither was true. I was so scared all the time that I didn't recognize the newly electric scent of my own skin, fear rising like light off of me, a kind of shocking shine. I was the bipolar sky before a tornado, so bright the look of it rang like sound, smelled like metal, shimmered like Hopkins' shook foil."

"Some women walked naked in the locker room, so slowly they may as well have been underwater, nothing wrong with being completely naked - even it it was what I considered to be 'bad naked,' a la that "Seinfeld" episode about what you do and don't do naked....Did this make me a woman-hater? Maybe, although clearly the same rules applied to men maybe exponentially. So maybe it just made me a prude? Probably, although I was also a reinvigorated sex monster who backed my student up against the sink at Coffee Queen against her will and better judgement, so could I be both a prude and a pervert?

"Of course! It was a common and popular Republican arrangement, wasn't it? I was just on my way to being a congressman, that was all..."

[Jason Pettus]

2021 reads, #23. DID NOT FINISH. Like I was mentioning the other week during my review of Jami Attenberg's All This Could Be Yours, although I'm acquaintances with a lot of Chicago authors because of all of us having a shared set of friends here among the so-called "community," I've tended to not actually read the work of many of these authors, because there's such a high chance of me finding the book only mediocre, and it's easier when meeting such writers over drinks at the latest local literary event to just plead ignorance instead of having to admit that I read their book but I just didn't like it very much. And so was the case today with Banshee by Rachel DeWoskin, a professor at the prestigious University of Chicago just a few blocks from where I live here in the Hyde Park neighborhood, which I found right from the start to be just too "MFAey" for my particular tastes, which if you're confused can best be summed up by Homer Simpson's reaction to hearing Ricky Gervais speak: "You take forever to say nothing!" Maybe earlier in my youth I would've been more into this, or perhaps if I had taken it on another year from now; but here as we enter the second straight spring of the pandemic, and I'm feeling exhausted and just want to get through my now insanely large TBR list as quickly as I can, and hopefully have a little fun along the way, this clever but mentally wearying book just hit me in exactly the wrong way at this particular moment in my life. Buyer beware.

[Twinkle · Rating 1 out of 5]

I could NOT get into this book and therefore could not get *through* this book. I found the protagonist to be entitled and a pretty awful person. I had a modicum of sympathy for her Breast Cancer diagnosis, but she quickly dissipated that. Too much to read to try and slog through something I wasn't enjoying.

[Ericka Clou · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very enjoyable mental breakdown.

[Zachary Littrell · Rating 2 out of 5]

"What if a neurotic poet got breast cancer, and had an affair?" ~ the novel.

Well, I think I'm disappointed. Because the blurbs made Banshee seem like Samantha the hero was going to go on an incendiary, liberated rampage when she had nothing left to lose. But in reality, it turns out to be a slow ho-hum nasal drip.

Let's get it out of the way, Samantha is unlikable. An asshole, really. And I think DeWoskin tried to get ahead of that criticism by lampshading it.

I don’t care whether characters—or even people, really—are likable. Can they just not be unbearably tedious?

But I think DeWoskin fumbled her own golden rule, because there's not much else redeemable in Sam. Being stuck in her head, you have to bear many long chapters of her self-loathing, self-absorption, guilty conscience, and generally stuck-up attitude. I know the author's intention is there is no right or wrong answer...but outside of her cancer diagnosis, what makes us root for Sam? Or even care if she fails? Her "realness"? It can be fun and interesting and even cathartic to follow a despicable character. But I'm not entirely sure what her student, who expresses genuine emotion, sees in her.

To Sam's credit, she recognizes it is not the cancer's fault. She has always had a chip on her shoulder, and this flash of mortality has encouraged her warts to fester and grow. But it is aggravating it takes the whole book for her to realize her family might be experiencing emotional turmoil too, like that's a major discovery ("Ah, my daughter wanted to come home because I have cancer?! Weird."). This is a big life-shaking ordeal! What sort of poet are you?

Why this gets 2 stars instead of 1 is because I think DeWoskin has a really interesting thesis. If a man has an affair with a young redhead student after a cancer diagnosis and accuses his colleagues of hypocrisy at a faculty meeting, he's having a mid-life crisis. If a woman does the same things, then she's must be going bananas.

The last nail in the coffin is that the ending is a non-ending. I knew in my heart-of-hearts that it would end where it did, and that is the most unsatisfying way possible. I realize DeWoskin is making a point about uncertainty, but that's a real cowardly kick in the ass to not give any measure of closure. Bleh.

[Crystal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this, it's a mixture of the midlife crisis and cancer novel except told from a woman's POV with some late-in-life queerness. Darkly funny, I laughed quite a bit.

I don't require likeability, especially from female characters, so I wasn't offput that this woman deftly destroys her until-then well-manicured life within a matter of weeks. I liked the meta of her wanting to act like a man in regards to her mid-life crisis while knowing she'd likely go unforgiven for not doing what she'd done her whole life, smoothing things over for everyone else, and for not being the perfect wife/mother/professor.

CW: college-age student/teacher relationship, consensual (of course, the power imbalance/age difference)

[Kira · Rating 2 out of 5]

Definitely an interesting read. I liked parts and hated parts. It's very lyrical, and sometimes that got to be too much.

[Max✨ · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book depressed the hell out of me. Even the sex scenes were depressing, which is just sad.

[Gail · Rating 1 out of 5]

As another reviewer wrote, even the sex scenes were horrible. Troubling acting out by a not-likable main character. Hard to be sympathetic.

[Megan · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 / I really loved a few of the sentiments in here but mostly the narrator annoyed me. Women with perfectly normal lives burning them down for the sake of nothing? Trying to gain control or feel like a man? Is a boring narrative to me or at least done like this. Anyway it had a few moments. I’m glad I’m done w it !

[Alexandra Costa · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5!! only picked up because purple cover (bpl summer reading :)) but like surprisingly good !

[Karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Written in the first person, Banshee is an exploration of a middle-aged woman, diagnosed with breast cancer, who is imploding. Samantha is a professor, a poet, a mother, a wife and a woman who commits a number of rebellious acts, but without really explaining why she is doing them. Like many of us, she questions herself, but never answers the questions to my satisfaction. While sympathetic to her breakdown, and her insights as a wife and mother, I couldn't identify with Sam as many of her actions seemed thoughtless, selfish and maniacal. All of this could have been explored to a deeper degree, but the ending left many unanswered questions. Not the funny and wry book I had hoped for.

[Nancy · Rating 1 out of 5]

I read over half of this one and then I just gave up. I didn’t care for the writing or the main character or what happened to her. I hardly ever give up on a book, but this one — no, just no.

[Amanda Steed · Rating 5 out of 5]

I hated the first 75 pages of this book and almost stopped reading it. It was an adjustment to read internal monologues that lasted after reading so many books that are dialogue heavy recently. Once my brain adjusted to the tone I couldn’t get enough, DeWoskin’s protagonist making me feel all possible ways toward her - endeared, disgusted and everything in between. She writes the thought, “Was is possible that I have never read a female character as disgusting as I was turning out to be?”, her self awareness of her unraveling relatable, giving the reader permission to hate her for her actions.

This book explores some needed territory for modern women, the relationship between mother and daughter seen from so many different perspectives. This section struck me as especially meaningful, “How do we learn to ask for what we need? To distinguish between what we want and what we need? And not to avoid want for so long that it becomes a need.” This is agonizingly relatable, as a woman, a wife, a mother, a friend.

This novel was well written and well edited, not including anything unnecessary. I’d recommend it to anyone who wants to be challenged by the discomfort of bad decisions during trying times.

[Rel · Rating 4 out of 5]

The only reason I didn't give this 5 stars is that for me it lacked a certain amount of gravitas (which perhaps says more about me than the content).

I found the main character very relatable - though I am not very similar to Sam, I do have many thoughts that are similar to lots of Sam's thoughts (at least the Sam we are presented with, who has received the zoetropic news of her cancer and impending operation, the catalyst of the plot).

Anyway, this was fantastically written, exceptionally poignant and beautiful -- human so human. Much of it is poetry in prose form (the narrator is a poetry professor), and the writing often makes allusions to poetry which rewards a liberal arts education, those is accessible with the context. I remember one Yeats reference (Adam's Curse) I found especially pleasing... I didn't mark the line in Banshee because it was a library book, but the Yeats line is "that I strove/ To love you in the old high way of love," and DeWoskin reformulates it Just So.

I learned new things about how mothers feel about their daughters, and it helped me understand the pull of that bond better.

Great title and design as well.

[Clarke · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought this book would be about female rage. I love a good story of a woman letting everything loose and allowing everything to burn down because people have wronged her. I couldn't have been more wrong. Nothing happens to the main character Sam from another person that warrants her behavior. She's narcissistic, selfish, and overall just an unlikeable character. I'm not opposed to not liking a character but still enjoying the book. However, I couldn't vibe with the writing style. I never had a "good for her" moment which I really wanted. I'd honestly give this book 2.5/5 stars. Read "Gone Girl" by Gillian Flynn if you want a good book about female rage.

[Cynthia Brodowska · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written beautifully, great internal voice. Love the complex characters and relationships.
To everyone who didn't like the book because you couldn't relate to the character or disliked her choices, I'd like to drop this quote from an essay by FeliciaC. Sullivan :"A book isn’t bad simply because it’s not an account of how we would have lived our lives had we walked in the character’s proverbial shoes."
https://medium.com/s/an-outsiders-gui...

[Antonia · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this book to be quite thematically interesting (breast cancer! infidelity! children! academia!), and beautifully written. Several turns of phrase really struck me. This is my first time reading anything by DeWoskin, so I wonder whether this is a trait of the character's own narration or of her writing more generally. In regards to the central character, I really found myself following her slow spiral into insanity. All in all, a good read!

[Melanie · Rating 3 out of 5]

there were parts of this book I really enjoyed but I needed to understand MORE why the main character went so far off the rails...I needed more why and more backstory. I didnt like getting thrust right into the thick of it without also a bit of a thoughtful exploration weaving within the book about her big life before and the choices she made and why. I think it had potential to do more but I generally found it a unique, interesting read.

[A · Rating 3 out of 5]

Every so often, my enjoyment of an otherwise good story - in any format (eg. filmed/live performance) - can be ruined by an unsatisfactory ending (which is virtually always due to flawed writing, such as a rushed or gratuitously vague ending. I’m sad that I was left with this familiar void upon finishing this novel.

[Tammy Matthews · Rating 2 out of 5]

The endless ruminations of a woman with breast cancer. Sound like a fun read? So little actually happens and it’s underwhelming. Some people gulp up such rambling stream-of-conscious prose because it reads the way they think. Not me. This was not a narrator that I wanted to spend such an intensive amount of time with.

I thought this was going to be about some woman’s self discovery, sleeping around and being bad in the face of mortality in a liberating way. Instead the main character plays along when a student hits on her (inciting action is passive) and has a lot of random outbursts and actions. Her choices aren’t even interesting. No scenario is built into the plot where we can cheer her on for being a raging beast. She’s given no motivation so it all falls flat.

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really enjoyed this book. The author/main-characters tone is resigned but deliciously sardonic as she remakes her life in the wake of a cancer diagnosis doing lots of uncharacteristic things. I kind of hope there is sequel, I really want to find out what happens next.

[Naomi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well written book, made me feel so many feelings and have some disturbing dreams (disclaimer: was also pregnant whilst reading this book which also comes with many feelings and vivid thoughts and dreams).

[Brinda Gurumoorthy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked the premise of a woman setting fire to her old life. I just expected it to be more exciting, I guess? And something about the prose didn't sit too well with me (too much figurative language for my taste perhaps). All right but not great.

[Quinn Arruda]

I really enjoyed Big Girl Small and Foreign Babes in Beijing, but this one didn't do it for me. After a couple of chapters I stopped enjoying the narrator's voice. It made sense for her to be self-indulgent at that point in her life, but it also became tiresome to read.

[Leslie]

"Lit Hub Daily," June 3, 2019

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

🔥amazing🔥

[Katherine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent, on every level.

[Jennifer Miles · Rating 5 out of 5]

An authentic, frightening, hilarious look at what it means to be going under the surgeon's knife with a small, however unlikely chance, of never again taking a voluntary breath.