Status Updates From Man Eater

The author's admission in the acknowledgements that she cut out 100k words of dual timelines and a second wife and a suffragette backstory makes the inconsistency and choppiness more forgivable. Pretty good ending.

Always back and forth: she's horrified of the idea of being pregnant--then it's all she wants and all that's sustaining her. She precognitively intuits that her husband is getting away with a crime--then realizes that she has already prevented that from happening.

Good Yesteryear-ish fakeout toward the end. Still, kinda woulda been better to take the Wizard of Oz route given the inconsistency of the narrative.

And now, The Ruins.

Direct Yellow Wallpaper quote, makes a lot of sense. Little on the nose, but makes sense.

Aaaaaand...there it is. I guess I'm glad I called it out before having it forced upon me...pun intended. So disappointing. The movie Primal is way more fun and basically the same plot except none of the Victorian fussiness.

Yet another example of the book trampling on its own hard-won tension with a totally contradictory action from the protagonist. She spends the whole book thinking how men underestimate women and how they don't know how much they rely on her, specifically, for botany. Then, when things get dire, she immediately destroys that agency with the assertion that she was stupid to have believed they needed her.

There's one, very shock-value horror trope that would make a lot of sense in this story, but so far, the author has demurred from the hungry-jungle-with-prehensile-vines meets woman-with-pregnancy-phobia angle. I really hope that's not where this is going. As confused and off-rhythm as it is, this book has a lot of solid content.

The book's point about chauvinistic expectations of women is diluted somewhat by the protagonist behaving dangerously and dishonestly to the extent that any person, of any gender, in any era might question it. Also, a common refrain has been that nothing in the jungle is "just a cut" but she's sure been getting sliced up in the last hundred pages. Seems to be getting along just fine.

The reveals of the 2nd half of the book have been undeniably entertaining and powerful, and it continues the meaningful subtext on the themes of motherhood and marriage while incorporating some conservationist ideas, but any mystery is generated by the narrator withholding information. Suddenly, there are a lot of deaths and supernatural occurrences at the same time as severe hallucination etc. Nothing is reliable.

It took 200 pages but this protagonist is finally making reasonable decisions. Not often a book starts strong and turns into garbage in the middle, then turns it around completely for the third act, but this could be one.

Though repetitive, the point about societal expectations of wives resonates powerfully here. Being this close to the halfway mark, though, the book is dangerously close to being comprehensively one-dimensional.

One cool element that the author has wisely kept in reserve is the "stick to the moors" implication about following the telegraph lines. Sort of the gun on the mantlepiece right now.

Not a good sign when the literary legacy your narrator mentions is rogues on the covers of paperback romance novels, but it's fitting here.

I've never loved erotic scenes in fiction, but some of this is just clumsy, which seems inevitable given the volume of it. I still haven't read Anne Rice, but I hope, when I do, none of her books come off so Twilighty.

A very circular plot: gossip, ruminate, eavesdrop, indulge, repeat. Like another book I recently read, this protagonist spends every chapter creating her own problems and then telling the reader how bad the consequences are.

There are some references to imply that the author is aware of anthropomorphism in regard to wildlife and ecological conservation, but in general, the story seems to be concerned only with past, current and future indiscretions and whether they result in pregnancy. If this were somehow tied into the environment--I think Herzog called it something like "malignant fecundity"--it might be edifying, or interesting.

The story is broken into 5 chapters, but they could be called Acts, or Instances of Arousal. This protagonist can't go 20 pages without getting hot for somebody.

The doll-shaped wasp's nest is a great visual, for sure.

Vivid imagery, convincing Victorian dialogue and atmosphere of repression, plot developing well. Much more focused on sex than I expected. There's still some slight disconnect with the environment and its inhabitants being treated more as scenery than a living ecosystem. Ferencik, Paver, Bayard made the jungle come alive in their thrillers. This one seems to be more about "passion."

Great opening.