Her Body and Other Parties

Stories

By: Carmen Maria Machado

Narrated by: Amy Landon

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

Didn’t get it

I couldn’t get the point of the book.
For me it seems like a person writing the diet think that ame into her mind.!

Horror Masterpiece

Absolutely in love with this short story collection. Carmen Maria Machado has a uniquely queer and feminine perspective on terror. The books says a lot about what it is to be a woman in our society and the inherent horror in that reality. At times it felt like this book was written just for me. It spoke so directly and frankly to my experiences that I could not help but be enthralled. I highly recommend.

... meh

I usually like short stories but this one has too much magical realism for my liking. The SVU portion in particular I found to be really confusing. I enjoyed a few of the other stories, I don’t want to give away spoilers so I’ll just leave it at that.

From a narration standpoint, the stories all run together. The new chapters are never signified so it can be really confusing. The woman’s voice was also a bit dry.

A new favorite collection

Beautiful, intoxicating writing, a sense of unreality. Loved these stories and their worlds. Amazing narration.

Desperately needs pauses between stories.

For some reason there aren't even short pauses between stories. Seems like a huge oversight. Because of the surreal nature of some parts of this book, the lack of delineation between chapters makes it extremely confusing to figure out where one story ends and the next one begins. Not in a good way. There are longer pauses within each story than there are between the stories. I feel like I didn't get a chance to appreciate the ending of each section because it took me a few minutes to even realize I had started a new chapter.

Otherwise I enjoyed this book. Kind of weird. In a good way.

I recommend looking up the titles of all the stories in this book so you can listen for the title of the next one, thereby getting some small indication that you're moving to the next story in the collection.

calling1

wild ride about the human female condition, You never live with a woman, you live inside I overheard my father say to my brother once HER BODY AND PARITES Is CARMEN MARIA MACHHADDO's brilliant first book a finalist for the 2017 NATONAL BOOK AWARDS.ITS collection of dark beautiful

It sounds like Siri is reading you a book

I had such high hopes for this book but unfortunately the terrible choice of robotic narrator was just too distracting to get me through the first chapter.

I sucked this book down in a 24 hour period.

The first story in this grabbed me and wouldn’t let go! These stories are stunning and there wasn’t one in this collection I wasn’t into. I immediately downloaded her other book on Audible.

have my 2 cents

the best story in the book was perfect and strange -- it is a piecework dream sequence replete with doppelgangers and mystery, familiar archetypal characters (benson and stabler from law and order SVU) who become more mysterious and unknowable the further the story progresses. I felt like I could have listened to it forever. like the best parts of mulholland drive. unfortunately that story happens in the middle of the book, and some of the stories before and after it do not compare. when machado is at her best, her characters are mysterious and visceral, and evoke a deeper understanding of the violence of being a woman. when she is not, the story feels overwrought and voyeuristic of trauma-- an unfocused jumble of gothic tropes and grotesque images designed to punch u so hard with feelings of revulsion u can't focus on whether or not they feel true.

I also rly disliked the narration bc my number one audiobook pet peeve is when readers have one single voice (identical pitch/inflection/pacing) for every character belonging to the opposite sex. If u want my advice that nobody asked for it would be : DONT change ur pitch if ur gonna sacrifice a sense of distinct character!!! Ok ....that's all

deep dive into many facets of the female perspective in society

Most of the stories kept me engaged and entertained. A couple seemed familiar, probably from other anthologies. Machado did a fine job of giving each of her characters their own voice,not easy to accomplish. I will add her to the list of authors I will check out when their work pops up in the queue.