I had this on hold for nearly two months before it got to my hands, and I’m glad it was the abridged audiobook and not the 500-page behemoth because wow…this was sadly not good.

If you’re looking for a literary analysis of the ‘wild woman’ archetype, you won’t find it here. After recalling a folktale/myth (without mentioning what variations of those tales may be), the author goes on a disjointed tangent that sometimes has nothing to do with the original story at all. Some of the tales don’t have a ‘wild woman’, either, all of them have wildly different female archetypes, some of which are subservient or have no autonomy at all.

The audiobook, while short, is egregious. The author ‘ahs’ and ‘uhms’, taking long pauses between words and sentences. There’s also a lot of huffing and puffing. Even at 1.25x speed, the pauses and hawing were distracting.

I do think there’s a kernel or two here that reflect much how I see the ‘wild woman’- in that many girls and women are told to stifle their natural messiness and strangeness to appease others. However, the execution of this through rambling and poor flow was frustrating. Skip it!