MixedThe New York Times Book Review\"Her book is no rose-tinted call to arms. These women’s stories don’t lend themselves to easy morals ... Flock, who helped produce a 2022 documentary on Smith’s case, brings rigor and granularity to her reporting, down to the Baptist pop anthem Smith sings on her way to court. By comparison, the sections on Dahariya and Zibo are uneven ... By the time we get to Flock’s section on Zibo, she is testing the limits of our empathy. Here, violence is undertaken not in self-defense but rather in the service of a political ideal ... Flock’s scope is ambitious, but her subjects’ narratives sit uneasily together, and key observations are sometimes glossed over quickly ... Flock has done a service by portraying her subjects’ human complexity.\
Meena Kandasamy
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewIt would be easy to ask, \'What kind of woman would allow that?\' Or even, \'Why did she stay?\' In 2012, when Kandasamy, a poet, translator and activist, wrote about her brief, violent marriage for the Indian magazine Outlook, these are the kinds of questions she was asked. When I Hit You is her urgent4memoir might offer; she is very clear that this is a work of fiction — of imagination, not of memory ... This book is Kandasamy’s rebuke to those who think privilege, financial or educational, protects against harm. Her characters are never named, their anonymity allowing the reader to slip easily into their skins ... Kandasamy is too skilled a writer to give us a caricature of an abusive man ... The book’s subtitle makes an ambitious nod to James Joyce, to the coming-of-age genre. Each chapter contains an epigraph by the likes of Kamala Das, Margaret Atwood, Anne Sexton, Zora Neale Hurston. These writers’ words have survived, and provided comfort, across time and cultures. And within the book, an answer — no, a warning — to the husband: Should I remind you that your wife is also a writer? And what is a writer, if not the one who gets to shape the narrative, to have the last word?
