Roxane Gay

Her perfect life is shattered when Mireille is kidnapped by armed men in front of her father's estate in Haiti and she must endure the horrors and torments of her captors while her father inexplicably resists paying for her ransom.

An Untamed State

Lindy

An OK novel except for the following points:
- everything about the protagonist's husband and her relationship with him is SUPER OBNOXIOUS. (view spoiler)[Among other things, it irritated me that the husband's racial fetish was never dealt with. (hide spoiler)]
- there is a weird romanticization of Midwest farm life.

azliana aziz

i am disappointed. this book has a very strong thematic plot but the writing, honestly for me it lacks punch. i feel disconnected for almost part. i try to feel for the characters but almost all of them is flat and 2 dimensional.

Liz B

This book is incredible, but it's very heavy.

The story is appalling, truthful, scared me, disgusted me, made me cry too. Especially made me think. One of the best read of the year so far. Roxane is a rare talent.

Emma Friedheim

This book hurts to read. It is also smart and well written and moving, but mostly it is painful. I have a throbbing headache and have been silently crying as I finish and I cannot say it was worth it. I'm happy to have read it (finally, I have been meaning to for the past year), but I don't think I can recommend that experience to people I love. OOF.

Tracey O’Rourke

Incredibly good, incredibly moving, incredibly HARD to read. Mirielle details all the inhumane, inhuman things that are done to her during her kidnapping and what it does to her during and after. Difficult but worth it.

Rachel

Mireille Duval Jameson has a fairy tale life in Miami with her husband and child, but it comes to an end when she visits her parents in Haiti and is kidnapped for ransom. Her father refuses to pay because he doesn't want to set a precedence and lose everything he has leaving Mireille tortured by captors that hate her family's wealth and what the represent in Haiti society. An Untamed State is a hard read, Roxane Gay writes what Mireille went through physically and emotionally without holding back. Mireille's kidnapping and her becoming undone is told to the backdrop of Haiti's inequality and it's effect on the government and citizen making it a lawless land that she never experienced because she came from a privileged family. Her mental state is heartbreaking and even more so when the ordeal is over and she is trying to remember who she once was before.

An Untamed State

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