Xanadu’s Reviews > Man Eater > Status Update

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.

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.