The Book of Joan by Lidia Yuknavitch
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I bounced. Hard.

I'm sorry, but DESPITE having a few concepts roll around in the novel that might have burrowed into my flesh OR a few passages that had some beauty, the grand majority of the text was nearly utterly ugly.

Why would I say such a thing?

Well, let me just describe it thus: Imagine Slaughterhouse Five without the time travel or the history, make it a universal mortification of the flesh and have everyone totally self-consumed with their lost, shriveled, stolen sexuality, turn it into an implausible SF that is more focused on clumsy literary metaphor, and the rest of the novel reads like a lowly trip through hell.

Sure, it's heavy on the feminism, too, but I hardly minded that.

You know what I minded? The fact that humanity would be nothing more than self-obsessed worms crawling around in the dirt bemoaning our lost sexuality. Like there's NOTHING more to us than that.

But then, maybe that's what some (or maybe even a lot) of people think.


So, I bounced. I kept trying and trying to find redeeming qualities, but it not only made me mightily uncomfortable in all the wrong ways, it even made me angry right down in my core, where that last inch of idealism cannot and will not be sacrificed.

Maybe I make too much out of this. Maybe I'm just saying it's a "oh hell no, it's not you, it's totally me", but in reality, I think the book is a bit of poison. Slow-working, agonizing, and soul-destroying.

So --no, thank you.

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