Feminism – DaneCobain.com

Rupi Kaur – The Sun and Her Flowers | Review

Title: The Sun and Her Flowers

Author: Rupi Kaur

Type: Poetry

Page Count/Review Word Count: 256

Rating 3.5/5

I honestly wasn’t expecting to enjoy this book anywhere near as much as I did. Kaur gets a bad rep for being an “Instagram poet” and because the content of basically all of her stuff is about relationships and feminism, but I don’t see how either of those are inherently bad things.

True, I didn’t much like the illustrations and I did start to flag with it towards the end, but I think that’s only natural when you’re reading so much poetry on the same theme. On the other hand, I really like it when poets build up a picture with just a few words, and I think Kaur is pretty good at that. In that respect, her work actually reminds me a little bit of a sort of feminist Charles Bukowski, which is almost ironic. I suspect they’d both take umbrage at that comparison.

All in all then, I was pleasantly surprised by this, and while it’s far from my favourite poetry collection, it was a lot better than I thought it was going to be and to be honest, above average when compared to pretty much all of the poetry I’ve ever been sent for review for my book blog. The difference is that I sought this one out, or at the very least I picked it up from a charity shop because I saw it. Yeah.

Click here to buy The Sun and Her Flowers.

Margaret Atwood – The Handmaid’s Tale | Review

Title: The Handmaid’s Tale

Author: Margaret Atwood

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 324

Rating: 5*/5

Margaret Atwood – The Handmaid’s Tale

This one is a serious contender for my book of the year so far and I can’t believe it took me this long to read it. As dystopian novels go, this is up there with 1984, and I personally preferred it. That’s quite the statement to make, especially when you consider that I’m an Orwell fan.

There are only three minor quibbles that I had with it. The first is that Atwood gets overzealous with commas and likes to use them, in weird places. A bit like that. The second is that the novel itself had the perfect ambiguous ending which was then immediately watered down by the “Historical Notes on The Handmaid’s Tale” at the end which basically removes the ambiguity of the first ending and sets up a second, slightly weaker ambiguous ending. And the third is that in the end, Offred basically gets brought down because she gets involved with a man. I was hoping all the way through that she’d have more common sense than that, but she didn’t.

Other than that, though, it’s an insightful dystopian novel which examines themes of sexuality, gender and feminism, but not in a way that will push you away if you’re a dude. Actually, the men in the book aren’t exactly in the best of situations, although they are admittedly better off than the women. But the historical stuff that happened which led up to the events of the novel feels plausible, and I can’t help but wonder how much inspiration Atwood found in the Nazi and Soviet regimes. Having just got back from Latvia, which was devastated by years of German and Russian oppression, it really hit close to the bone.