Club awarded it an A letter grade and praised it as "a gripping psychological portrait of how trauma remakes the body to respond only to itself." Awards Nolan Feeney writing for Time called it a "riveting debut" that "captivates from its opening sentence and doesn't let go." The Los Angeles Times called it "suspenseful, immediate and realistic." The A.V. Roxane Gay's striking debut novel, 'An Untamed State,' is a fairy tale in this vein, its complex and fragile moral arrived at through great pain and high cost." Reception Reviews Īn Untamed State received positive reviews upon publication. that a passing stranger raped Sleeping Beauty as she lay unconscious, or that Snow White's jealous stepmother not only called for her death but wanted to eat her liver and lungs. In the New York Times, Holly Bass said in contrast to contemporary, happy-ending-focused fairy tales, Gay's interpretation of the genre recalled "the real horrors of the original Brothers Grimm stories and their ilk . She frames it as a fairy tale: 'Once upon a time, in a far-off land, I was kidnapped'". From the first sentence, we know Mireille has found a way to craft her story to make it bearable.
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Reviewing the novel for the Los Angeles Times, Chris Daley suggests the fairy tale theme serves to translate unspeakable trauma: "Written from Mireille's perspective, 'An Untamed State' is an account of what is normally unaccountable: a level of trauma that, even if it is survived, is often too painful to relate. The latter section of the novel, "Once Upon a Time," follows Mireille in the aftermath of her trauma, including her time living with Michael's mother, Lorraine, on the family farm in Nebraska.Ĭommentary on An Untamed State frequently cites the novel's emphasis on fairy tale. In the first portion of the book, called "Happily Ever After," the novel moves back and forth in time between Mireille's captivity and her earlier life, meeting and falling in love with husband Michael during graduate school in the Midwest of the United States. When her father, who by now has become a wealthy Haitian developer, refuses to pay her ransom, she is gang-raped and tortured by her captors, who keep her imprisoned for 13 days before finally releasing her. While vacationing at her parents' house with her husband and child in Haiti, she is kidnapped.
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Mireille Duval Jameson is born and raised in the United States, her parents are from Haitian descent.