Her Body and Other Parties

By: Carmen Maria Maria Machado

Narrated by: Amy Landon

Length: 8 hrs and 41 mins

Publisher's summary

In her provocative debut, Carmen Maria Machado demolishes the borders between magical realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism.

Startling narratives map the realities of women's lives and the violence visited on their bodies, both in myth and in practice. A wife refuses her husband's entreaties to remove the mysterious green ribbon from around her neck. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague spreads across the earth. A salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying discovery about a store's dresses. One woman's surgery-induced weight loss results in an unwanted house guest. Bodies become inconsequential, humans become monstrous, anger becomes erotic.

A dark, shimmering slice into womanhood, Her Body and Other Parties is wicked and exquisite.

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

Beautiful, haunting stories

Machado is a gifted writer and a fantastic storyteller. These stories are beautiful and haunting, and they always have a critical eye to the era that birthed them. They are fiercely feminist and equally funny and heartbreaking. My only quibble is that this collection does not strike me as all that well suited for audio book'ing; many of them are meta tales about the acts of writing and reading, which makes listening to them rather than reading them less satisfying. An example is the story 'Especially Heinous', which consists of small vignettes/episode synopses, which means that the narrator has to constantly reign in the pace and speak yet another title, and to me this ruined the flow of the story somewhat. Another example is 'The Husband Stitch', which begins with a guide on HOW to read the story aloud, which makes listening to the story being read aloud a fun experience, but also takes something away from the imagination that would otherwise have been needed in order to fashion the voices oneself and following the increasingly ridiculous and dangerous instructions (which one cannot possibly follow, of course, but as a reader, one would be presented to them as something one would have to consider and then reject - or not, of course, that is up to you).
All in all, I wish I'd read the stories instead of having them read to me, but under any circumstances: better listened to than not experienced at all.

Loved one, and no others

The green ribbon was entrancing. The rest, a disappointment. I struggled to finish listening to this book.

Oneiric. Stylistically well written but...

The author has a good command of style but narrative-wise the story is too fragmentary to drive any coherent experience. Well, it reads like one long dream, and in that sense it is an experience. But it is not an enjoyable read. Hard to follow beyond the second, long, chapter. Another weak point is that characters, apart from narrator, and especially men, come across as too shallow.