Lady Macbeth by Ava Reid: Oh Dear. Maybe Don't Read This Book

Here's another cross-posted review of a book I read this month. I think this review has the dubious honor of being the first one star review of this book posted to Goodreads. So...that's fun!

I read an e-arc of Lady Macbeth through Edelweiss pretty much as soon as it was available for me to download, because I was very curious as to how a retelling of Macbeth that makes Lady Macbeth a 17-year-old girl was going to work. And I'm now forced to conclude that it...doesn't work, actually!

Full review below. I feel like there are at least a few spoilers, so proceed with caution if you care about that sort of thing.

At least the cover's pretty

Expected publication date: August 6th 2024

Read: January 19th - 20th

Rating: 1/5 stars

goodreads

Okay, now what was the point of any of that.

It doesn't even have the Macduff "untimely ripped" line, you guys!

This probably isn't a good book to read if you like the play Macbeth or the country of Scotland or even just the experience of not being bored as you read a book. If you don't care about Macbeth and you're fine with literally countless instances of Scotland/Scottish people being portrayed as violent and uncivilized and if you want a book about the struggles of being a hot waifish French teenage girl who's trying to find her place in the world, I guess you COULD read this book. But like, why would you. What's the point.

That's the overarching question I have about all of this. What's the point? What's the point of this story tying itself to Macbeth as a retelling or reimagining? What's the point of reimagining Lady Macbeth as a teenage girl named Roscille and Macbeth himself as a comically large, hulking, scary violent man who compels her to kill the king, instead of himself being egged on and compelled? And what's the point of claiming any of these changes somehow makes this book a feminist retelling? What's the point of the DRAGON? No, really. That one I want an explanation for.

So what is this book. GREAT QUESTION. It's a version of Macbeth where Lady Macbeth, here known as Roscille, is a beautiful bastard French girl believed to be cursed and maybe also believed to have witch powers. She arrives at Macbeth's castle to marry him and promptly starts trying to find ways to 1) avoid having to consummate the marriage by giving him different seemingly-impossible quests 2) maybe scheme, a little bit. The quests end up spurring on a lot of what we're familiar with as the plot of the play version of Macbeth, and I guess so does the scheming.

The scheming is, to be honest, really annoying, because Roscille is purportedly smart. One of the first things we're told about her is that she's really good with faces and names and little details about people. When we get to the end of the book and she does not know anyone's faces or names or little details, this is merely lampshaded as a sign of how much being in Scotland has changed her. Sure, we could go with that. I would probably call it a show/tell discrepancy, but why not chalk it up to character development! Yeah!

Anyway, there are a lot of times within this book when Roscille tells herself that she's being smart by asking a subtle and non-suspicious question, and then she follows it up IMMEDIATELY with an extremely un-subtle and suspicious question. Smart things that smart people do. It's hard to get invested in the machinations of the main character when they're so badly machinated. I also never got a sense of why she's doing what she's doing, beyond being afraid of having to consummate her marriage or hoping to accumulate more power in her new role. But she's so ignorant about the new location she's in that her attempts to get power just keep back firing. It's frustrating, especially if she's supposed to be wily and smart.

Oh, and there's a guy who can turn into a dragon. I don't have a lot to say about it. Yes, he's the love interest. Yes, he's the singular non-garbage man in this book. It is...what it is.

This book, instead of feeling like a feminist and fresh take on the source material, feels like it constructs an even more patriarchal and sexist world in which Roscille has significantly less agency than the traditional Lady Macbeth. Why? All so that she can eventually break free and get some agency at the end. I guess we should all clap! I don't really get what the point of this is or why it's...necessary. I mean I guess if you resonated with this story, more power to you....?

I personally would be more interested in a reimagining that's interested in contending with the ways women (either in 11th century Europe or in Shakespeare's plays) seek, attain, and exert power. Focusing a re-imagining instead on a girl who is specifically stripped of agency and experience feels...weird. Like yeah, I know the patriarchy is a thing, but this book is so determined to show how bad Roscille's position in society is as a (upper class) woman that it feels like we're inventing NEW kinds of misogyny.

And speaking of weird, it feels like there's some weird gender essentialism going on in this book, tied up with the very weird anti-Scots vibes. Every man in this book except the half-English love interest is a brutish Scotsman who hates women and loves battle scars and fighting and lapping up the blood of their enemies. Roscille, our main character, is a delicate noblewoman who is tiny (especially in comparison to Macbeth, who is never not HUGE in this book) and who starts off not even knowing how to get dressed independently. At one point, after witnessing violence against a woman, she wishes she were a man so she could enact violence back onto them. Because only men do violence? Is that the implication? I guess so, because that thought is literally never challenged!

If this book is trying to be feminist it feels like we should discuss the women characters it introduces. This will not take long, because there are not very many women in this book. There's Hawise, Roscille's first handmaiden and a Norse "spoil of war," who disappears very early on (But not before we're told about her husky Norse shoulders like 3 different times!). There's the three witches, of course. There's mentions of Roscille's father's wife, who is considered to be "mad" after enduring several attempts at balancing her humors. There's Roscille's second handmaiden, who literally looks the same as Hawise (shoulders and all). I'm...pretty sure that's it. Roscille is the only one who's pretty, by the way.

There's an attempt in this story to do something kind of interesting with the witches, but it also lead to me wondering why this book wasn't a retelling of some other story. Like Bluebeard. It would have been so easy to make this story Bluebeard. SO many Bluebeard elements are already present. The keys?! The suspicious basement??

Honestly I just don't understand why this is a Macbeth retelling in the first place. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth both feel like entirely different characters from their play versions. There's not much interest in backing up the play with historical details - this book isn't any more historically accurate than the play was. The plot follows the beats of the play, kind of, but without any real enthusiasm. I kind of think this book would have been better off as a Bluebeard retelling or EVEN! An original story that wasn't marketed as connected to anything else in particular. Maybe with less Scotland bashing. Boy howdy it's uncomfortable how Scotland is talked about in this book!

I also think the writing is just...bad. This may be partly subjective, but isn't everything? I personally cannot stand the prose or writing style of this book. I don't even know if I can explain why, it just constantly bugged me. I was fine with the writing in A Study in Drowning, but something about the narration here left me bored and yet annoyed at every step of the way. The pacing also dragged a lot in the middle of the book, which exacerbated the issues for me. And there are continuity errors, and repetitive descriptions, and overly on-the-head metaphors and imagery...I was not jiving with the writing, let's sum it up that way.

If you want to read a gothic fantasy with a girl who's Too Beautiful For Her Own Good and a boy who is the One (1) Non-Garbage Man, and if you're also set on reading something by Ava Reid, maybe read A Study in Drowning instead. That book has problems, but it at least has some merits. This? Please don't read this. I cannot emphasize how much I did not enjoy and do not recommend this book.