Lady Macbeth

Firstly, the cover is gorgeous. Kudos to Elizabeth Wakou for her work. It's the best thing about this book and this star is for her. Secondly, I hated this book's guts. Feminist retelling this, female rage that – I need to get some female rage off my chest right now. A lot of it.

Feminist in marketing only, Lady Macbeth recoils from everything that made the original character powerful and interesting, offering up a defanged "reclamation" that contorts itself around into baffling misogyny. What is this feministly reclaiming, exactly? What was the author's thought process here? "Wouldn't it be subversive if literature's greatest female villain had no power, ambition, personality, or agency? Isn't that actually doing more feminism? What if she wasn't even a villain, because only men can be bad? What if she was a nubile teenager so beautiful it drove men mad to look at her? What if she really needed a handsome prince to save her? What if her biggest burden was being gorgeous?"

The astonishingly brass-necked blurb says this book "gives Lady Macbeth a voice". Christ. She didn't need one. I cannot imagine the dream-world in which this pablum is doing Lady Macbeth any favours. It's a rebuttal against a version of the character that doesn't exist, against a narrative the author has imagined, to glorify an otherwise nothing story. Reid takes a mature, dominant, challenging, driven woman and mushes her down into soft, bland Teletubby custard to make her palatable and #relatable. This corrective new "Lady" is a demure, gentle, beautiful, naïve, feminine, chaste, goody-two-shoes woman-child who can do no wrong, even though that's all she does.

As well as being a preternatural bombshell, our heroine Roscille is meant to be uncommonly observant and clever, which manifests as her jumping to contrived conclusions, BBC Sherlock-style, and getting dozens of people killed along the way. I started questioning this character's supposed resourcefulness when her first ✨ clever plan ✨ gets a castle full of people slaughtered. She thinks vaguely of this as a minor whoopsie, or even a net positive because the castle would've been full of evil rapist men anyway. No, really. She and the narrative are over it in a couple of chapters.

I feel bad for any Scottish people who read this book. Reid's contemptuous portrayal of Scotland would make a medieval propagandist proud: a godforsaken, barbaric place populated by brutish rapists who speak an animalistic language. The Scottish are essentially written as a subhuman fantasy race. Barely a page goes by without some observation of how they are primitive, uncivil, beast-like, cruel, crass, and loveless. If this was set in a fictional world peopled by monsters, such broad strokes might've been easier to swallow, but, as it stands, this "historical" setting just reads like an American author's lazy Celtophobic delusion. For good measure, Reid drops a jus primae noctis mention in the first chapter. Did her research into Scotland begin and end with Braveheart?

Through the miserable lens of Lady Macbeth, men are all predatory ogres and women exist to be brutalised. I say "exist" loosely, as the book sidelines every woman except our spineless heroine. The women unlucky enough to be described are still trolls next to dainty Roscille, with their big shoulders, small hips, and wrinkles. You could excuse some things as being limitations of Roscille's worldview but, seeing how the rest of the book is so ill-considered, I'm not moved to generosity.

I hoped the prose would at least be good, but it's not. I love lyrical, figurative writing but this just has the off-kilter whiff of an author overreaching for "mature and embellished". Just within the first chapter, the sky is "sickishly vast" and "epithet" is used three times in a couple of pages. Characters have quavering frowns and nickering heartbeats. "A dramatic ordeal of blood" appears, followed not long after by "a great ordeal of blood". The same character is described twice as being "miserly with his violence" – a good turn of phrase when seen once, but slipshod when seen again. The barbican grinds open. The barbican grinds open. The barbican grinds open again. The bloody barbican grinds open again. The barbican grinds op–Christ on a bike! The word you're looking for is "gate" and your editor is asleep on the job. I'm also certain Reid doesn't know what "posthumous" means, because her usage of it is repeatedly mystifying.

The word "canny" is overused, which is very funny for a book that disdains everything Scottish. "Canny as a weasel", "the canny mind of a weasel", "a canny animal", "canny as an ermine", "a canny ermine". Hello, editor? Hello? There are a few too many instances of "[noun] is an [adjective] thing", aiming for literary but giving Lightlark. There are endless yawnsome metaphors about slippery lampreys, bloody consummation, and tiles on a draughts board (pieces, surely) to make sure you get the Themes™ and Motifs™, as if you could've missed them.

The book's entire premise – Lady Macbeth being a helpless, reluctant pawn in her powerful husband's schemes – crumbles at the slightest scrutiny, all because Roscille has this pointless mind-control power. All she has to do is look Macbeth in the eye and it's curtains for him. But oh, woe is her, she just can't do it! I kept waiting for some clever reveal – that her hypnotic gaze was a misdirection, something symbolic rather than literal – but it never came. Nope, she just has actual Jedi mind-tricks that she never uses to help herself. Just, what? Calling it a plot hole seems unfair to plot holes.

And don't even get me started on how, the morning after Macbeth finally violently consummates their marriage, Roscille goes skinny-dipping in the woods to wash the blood off, and guilt-trips her handsome prince boyfriend into having amazingly pleasurable sex with her. What crusty old man from the 1980s wrote this?

Lady Macbeth is the slickly packaged definition of "go girl give us nothing". As a retelling, it bears so little resemblance to its source, it's not even a distant cousin. As a historical fantasy, it's as shallow as a Pinterest board and insultingly negligent. I don't know why Reid didn't just fully commit to the "waifish virgin bride meets magical dragon prince" story that this clearly wants to be instead. But then there'd be no "feminist retelling" hook to sell it, would there?

I liked this retelling. Macbeth is not my favorite piece of work by Shakespeare, but I enjoyed the story regardless of that. I really loved the route the retelling went, with lady Macbeth having magical powers, actually being somewhat of a witch, and also her having a more elevated role in the story of Macbeth. 

I had high hopes for Lady Macbeth by Ava Reid, but I was a bit disappointed with how loosely it sticks to the source material. While Lady Macbeth retains her background and some of her power, she ultimately becomes a demure woman defined by the men around her, rather than the fierce, manipulative force we know from Shakespeare. In the original play, Lady Macbeth is a great villainess who emasculates Macbeth with nearly every interaction, driving much of the tragedy's tension. However, Reid's retelling softens her character considerably, which didn't align with my expectations.

That said, I suppose that's the point—considering a story written by a man in those times is more likely to cast a woman as crazed and a villain. Reid offers an interesting exploration of Lady Macbeth's psyche, challenging the traditional narrative and presenting a more nuanced character. It's still a good read with its own merits, just not the dark, power-driven narrative I was hoping for. If you're looking for a fresh take on Macbeth, this might be for you—just be prepared for a much more subdued Lady Macbeth.