Helen Zahavi

Skimmed through this some time ago, figured I'd read it properly to start off the reading year (not a very good novel, obviously, but above YA fiction). This is one of those books which affects being very violent and subversive and all that, but is really rather tame for a book of its genre, and whose reputation doesn't match the content of the text because reviewers who presumably have not read much trashy literature exaggerate the gory stuff (which reminds me of this Natsuo Kirino anecdote where some male radio host refused to talk with her because she had written a novel featuring a woman murdering her husband ; another case where someone's puritanical reaction gives a book an undeserved reputation of edginess).

You'd expect a rape/revenge novel written by a (presumably) feminist, jewish-russian female writer to go all out and become the ultimate outlet for her frustrations, and by proxy, for all women's frustrations, but at key moments the novel holds back.

When the protagonist is stuck with the dentist in his car, without any weapons, and is forced to fellate him, she doesn't do anything and only later rams him down with his car. The excuse given for this is that ''her teeth were not sharp enough''. And all the other murders feature men who do not fight back, with one sleeping, one willingly submitting himself to the protagonist, the 3 hooligans being unarmed, and the last one not doing anything presumably because Zahavi couldn't be bothered to write a fight scene. If one of the objectives of the book is to remind culprits that retribution may come to them one day because Bella might have ''woken up this morning with the knowledge that she's finally had enough'', then it completely fails at that by having the men behave exactly how Bella was behaving prior to her killing spree, with fear and feebleness, completely unrealistically - and so the rape revenge fantasy is not some call to action or some way to scare rapists off, but just that, a fantasy.… (mehr)