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  • Her Body and Other Parties

  • Stories
  • Written by: Carmen Maria Machado
  • Narrated by: Amy Landon
  • Length: 8 hrs and 42 mins
  • 2.9 out of 5 stars (25 ratings)

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Her Body and Other Parties

Written by: Carmen Maria Machado
Narrated by: Amy Landon
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Publisher's Summary

In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. In this electric and provocative debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women's lives and the violence visited upon their bodies.

A wife refuses her husband's entreaties to remove the green ribbon from around her neck. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague slowly consumes humanity. A salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying discovery within the seams of the store's prom dresses. One woman's surgery-induced weight loss results in an unwanted houseguest. And in the bravura novella Especially Heinous, Machado reimagines every episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, a show we naïvely assumed had shown it all, generating a phantasmagoric police procedural full of doppelgängers, ghosts, and girls with bells for eyes.

©2017 Carmen Maria Machado (P)2017 HighBridge, a Division of Recorded Books

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up and down

some stories are really great and others are hard to get through. They quality of writing and engagement ebbs and flows but in more jarring manner than is pleasant.

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars
  • Amy
  • 2023-09-25

Good but -

Narrator does a great job. Writer is creative. But there are no audio prompts when a new story begins so if you auto play into the next chapter it can be startling to realize you’re suddenly listening to a new short story and the previous one had ended abruptly. SVU Chapter is so confusing and disjointed. Had to skip.

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  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars
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    2 out of 5 stars

I couldn’t finish this book

I try to force myself to finish books that I don’t connect with but I gave up halfway through this one. It wasn’t what I expected. It’s just a jumbled series of short stories about women that are hyper sexual and sci-fi but also feminist? There’s also a short story/several chapters which are just the titles of Law and Order SVU episodes with an odd blurb or two about the characters of the show that are also sci-fi.

I see what the other was trying to do — or perhaps did but not in a way that I enjoyed. We definitely need more stories of women and their bodies, sexuality, desires, queerness etc. that aren’t making a big deal of themselves. However, this book feels like a huge steep to climb in order to make meaning of the stories offered.

This book is obviously for some and I’m glad. But it’s not for me and If you aren’t sure if you’ll like it, definitely read a sample (I found the first story/chapter 1 and 2 good and not as off putting as the rest). Good luck.

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    4 out of 5 stars

Skip the one about SVU Otherwise it’s wonderful

Incredible and beautifully written, the 4th story sticks out like a sore thumb, I recommend skipping it. It’s almost unlistenable. Might be better to read but awful in audio.

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