Her Body and Other Parties

06/07/2019 Edit: Eff it, 5 stars. This is such a good collection and has stuck with me.

Original review:
(This review can also be found on my blog.)

I love weird fiction and I love short stories and I love literature with a feminist slant, so this collection was 100% for me. Machado's writing is just beautiful and the prose in every piece stands out so strongly. There were only a couple pieces that fell flat for me, the rest of the collection was fairly hard-hitting. I definitely recommend this to everyone, but warn that there are a lot of sensitive topics tackled, so anyone with triggers should proceed with caution.

Brides never fare well in stories. Stories can sense happiness and snuff it out like a candle.

My rating for each story:

Her Body and Other Parties ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Inventory ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Mothers ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Especially Heinous ⭐️⭐️
Real Women Have Bodies ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Eight Bites ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
The Resident ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Difficult at Parties ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

“It's not that I hate men,” the woman says. “I'm just terrified of them. And I'm okay with that fear.”

I actually had to double-check my math, because it turns out that these scores averaged out to 4.75 stars. I guess the two-star story threw me off. I'm rounding down to 4 on Goodreads because it just doesn't feel like a five-star collection to me. There was just... something missing. Don't get me wrong, I thoroughly enjoyed reading this. It's just not quite there for me yet. I'm definitely going to keep an eye out for future works of Machado's.