Friday, November 06, 2020

Six books featuring dark anti-heroines

Susie Yang was born in China and came to the United States as a child. After receiving her doctorate of pharmacy from Rutgers, she launched a tech startup in San Francisco that has taught 20,000 people how to code. She has studied creative writing at Tin House and Sackett Street. She has lived across the United States, Europe, and Asia, and now resides in the UK. White Ivy is her first novel.

At CrimeReads, Yang tagged six books featuring dark anti-heroines who test the limits of morality, including:
Fates and Furies, by Lauren Groff

Mathilde is one half of a seemingly perfect couple in this wonderfully layered novel about the deceptions of marriage. The fascinating thing about this book is that we don’t get Mathilde’s perspective until halfway through the book. In the beginning, we only know her as a beautiful, supportive wife of a successful playwright, yet when the book does switch over to Mathilde’s point of view, I physically got chills. Mathilde is ruthless, calculating, and determined—she hides her less-than-innocent background from her husband, lies to him about her relationship with her mother-in-law, about her fertility, about even her role in writing her husband’s plays. There is no question that Mathilde’s frigid—even cruel—interior is unlikeable, yet I still found her voice utterly compelling.
Read about another entry on the list.

Fates and Furies is among Katie Lowe's ten favorite books about angry women, Jeff Somers's ten novels that teach you something about marriage and six of President Obama's favorite books.

--Marshal Zeringue