Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession by Alice Bolin

DNF @ 10%

Someone else pointed out the irony of Alice Bolin writing about how dead girls are used to titillate, and then doing it to sell copies of her own book. It's the obvious criticism, and yet, I'm going to second it because like Rebecca Solnit's MEN EXPLAIN THINGS TO ME, the title of this book is somewhat misleading as to what this book is going to be about.

Like MEN EXPLAIN THINGS, only the first essay really has a lot of relevance to the title, the rest of this book (from what I've read and skimmed) are mostly this author musing on Joan Didion and Los Angeles and how it's changed over the years, which might be interesting to some people, but not really to me. I was expecting this book to be similar to the Women in Refrigerators blog: a criticism of how young women are killed in fiction and how that correlates to the internalized misogyny of our society.

I'm just glad I bought this book on sale because I'd be pretty angry if I bought this full price expecting one thing and ended up getting something else.

1.5 out of 5 stars