A review by caitlclark
Becoming the Villainess by Jeannine Hall Gailey

4.0

I don’t know why I gave this such a negative review the first time round, I originally gave it 2 stars and now, after re-reading it, I’m bumping that up to 4. This collection is brilliant and smart and incredibly topical, it’s feminist poetry for nerds and it’s truly wonderful. I guess my appreciation for raw storytelling like this wasn’t as refined then as it is now, and I’m sure the same thing goes for my pop culture knowledge. The couple of years it’s been since I first read Jeannine Hall Gailey’s collection have been one’s of growth. In that time I’ve clearly grown to learn just how fucked up we treat the women in our films, our myths, our comic books. And though we have made so much progress recently, we still have a long way to go and we have poetry collections like ‘Becoming the Villainess’ to fuel our anger until then. I adored this collection.