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With My Body is not for everyone. Like The Bride Stripped Bare it is not for the faint of heart. Second person narratives can be awkward and challenging, unwieldy in hands less capable. Fourtunately, Nikki Gemmell excels at the difficult POV. I've always loved second person narratives (WAY WAY more than first person which seldom feel very organic for me) and I love Gemmell's especially. The unflinching rawness of the text grabs hold and shakes loose expectations. It's challenging and difficult and truthful about women and marriage and sex and sexuality. But to focus on the sex or the age gap between the main characters, I think, is selling the book short. Those things are meant to be disturbing. I think that we are meant to think outside of the prescribed boundaries of socially acceptable normalcy. What I read between the lines is that sometimes women lose themselves (or never get a chance to discover themselves at all) because they are too busy trying to be what other people say they should be. I know a few of those women.
It's not that that kind of life is a bad thing. Our narrator comes to terms with that kind of life when she finally comes to terms with her stepmother, but it's also not the only way, and I think that the heart of this book comes in encouraging, describing, and depicting a woman who approaches life from a different perspective. She is less tied down by conventional constructs because of her very unconventional relationship with Tol. I am not commending the relationship. If anything I find it questionable that an older man feels that he is equipped in any way to teach a young woman HOW TO BE a woman (in any sense). That said, learning to take ownership of ones own body and sexuality is pretty damn huge. The female body and sexuality are fraught, sociopolitical battlegrounds and no negotiation of that identity can be treated without inciting someone.
I read With My Body a few books after I finished the Fifty Shades of Gray trilogy and it makes an interesting counterpoint. If only James's books had been so self-aware. But then this book is not a romance. Yes, it is about love and romantic love does play a part in it, but it is NOT a romance novel. If anything it builds up ideals only to strip them down, emphasizing that locating happiness, self-acceptance, and self-worth in any place besides within oneself is foolish and destructive. With all that said, I would still choose Tol over Christian Gray any day of the week.
It's not that that kind of life is a bad thing. Our narrator comes to terms with that kind of life when she finally comes to terms with her stepmother, but it's also not the only way, and I think that the heart of this book comes in encouraging, describing, and depicting a woman who approaches life from a different perspective. She is less tied down by conventional constructs because of her very unconventional relationship with Tol. I am not commending the relationship. If anything I find it questionable that an older man feels that he is equipped in any way to teach a young woman HOW TO BE a woman (in any sense). That said, learning to take ownership of ones own body and sexuality is pretty damn huge. The female body and sexuality are fraught, sociopolitical battlegrounds and no negotiation of that identity can be treated without inciting someone.
I read With My Body a few books after I finished the Fifty Shades of Gray trilogy and it makes an interesting counterpoint. If only James's books had been so self-aware. But then this book is not a romance. Yes, it is about love and romantic love does play a part in it, but it is NOT a romance novel. If anything it builds up ideals only to strip them down, emphasizing that locating happiness, self-acceptance, and self-worth in any place besides within oneself is foolish and destructive. With all that said, I would still choose Tol over Christian Gray any day of the week.
