Book Review: A Hymn to Life: Shame has to change sides by Gisèle Pelicot

An immensely powerful biography from one of the bravest women in history Gisèle Pelicot, who dares to unmask rapists and a misogynistic legal system in France and do so with her own softly spoken steely courage. One not to miss!

Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

Genre: Biography, True Crime

Publisher: Penguin 

Review in one word: Powerful

You no doubt would have heard of the case of Gisele Pelicot in recent years, an elderly Frenchwoman and a grand-mère whose monstrous husband was, for decades, drugging her and filming her being raped by dozens of men.

The story that shocked the world and led to all manner of salacious, sexist and rumour-filled tabloid news stories. In amongst it all Gisele refused to be reduced to a rubble of fear and horror.

Most women with lesser strength would have been broken to learn that their husbands were doing that. Instead Gisele, a softly spoken, gentle, traditional (as are many women of her generation) reveals her fierce emotional strength as she explains in her own words her own story.

The media throughout the case cast doubt upon her, as did the judiciary, which wanted to seed suspicion that she must have known what was happening to her. That she somehow consented.

Her husband Dominic or as she affectionately called him Doume was drugging her and meanwhile gaslighting her and their children that their mother was having memory lapses, possibly signs of early dementia.

In the meantime this monster was orchestrating men of all ages and backgrounds via the dark web to rape his own wife, hundreds of men, over decades.

It all sounds like a really confronting read! But honestly this book was profound in its ordinariness, the first chapter opens showing Gisele going through her daily cleaning and cooking routine, laying the dining table.

The power of this book lays in the fact that these were people who have the same values and ideas about life as most other people in western nations. These are likely your neighbours, friends, people you may know.

A lot of the book dissects Dominic and Gisele’s marriage and goes deep into their respective childhoods. Both came from working class backgrounds but where Gisele had loving parents and a mother who died tragically when she was only eight years old; Dominic had a deeply sadistic father who sexually abused Dominic’s disabled foster sister, later marrying her once his wife died (under highly suspicious circumstances).

Throughout the whole ordeal, many other people – her self-motivated first lawyer, the media, her neighbours, her children and their partners and the court-appointed psychologist – all wanted to impose upon her their own perception of who she was. A victim of domestic abuse, a subjugated woman and a slave, an emotionless enigma. Yet here in the book, we learn how Gisele feels about Dominic, her life and what happened to her – the only answer to the media circus that ever mattered!

After several years of hiding away in a remote village following the revelations, she is introduced to another man by mutual friends, who has also endured heartbreak as well (losing his wife to cancer), and miraculously, despite the huge betrayal she endured, Gisele is able to find love again with a new man Jean-Loup. She goes towards love, connection and light despite all that has befallen her, a sign of her inner strength.

“I know my story has fuelled disgust for men, but it has not done that for me. I know that the image the world had of me at that point was nothing more than of a woman who had been horrifically abused; if I had any memories of the ordeal, I’m sure that is what I would have been reduced to, and it probably would have killed me. But I was forged in a different time and place. The way I think about life was wrought at the moment of my mother’s final breath, when Papa leaned over her and whispered her name, and I squeezed her shoulder and begged her to wake up. In that instant I felt a wave of infinite love wash over me, far stronger than death. That sensation saved me, carried me through, and no doubt also blinded me and warped my judgement, considering everything I endured with Dominique. And yet the feeling persists: love is not dead. I am not dead. I still have faith in people. Once, that was my greatest weakness. Now it is my strength. My revenge.”

Gisele was buoyed up and given courage throughout the trial by the presence of hundreds of women who came every day to the court and gave her letters about how much they admire her courage in speaking out. This was truly a remarkable book, that both chronicles the darkest parts of human nature and the celebrates the courage to love in spite of it all.

I highly recommend this book.

Content Catnip

Book Review: An Honest Woman by Charlotte Shane

An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work by Charlotte Shane contains some juicy insights into what it’s like to be a sex worker but lacks a certain emotional honesty and vulnerability to the telling.

Rating: 🌟🌟

Genre: Memoir, Non-fiction, Feminism, Sexuality

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review in one word: Juicy

An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work by Charlotte Shane is an electrifying insight into the hidden world of being a sex worker. Shane is an exceptional writer who manages to paint some incredible paintings with her words.

The book traces Charlotte’s origin story being a young woman who preferred the company of boys rather than girls. I get that this is a counter to a lot of the man-bashing, man-hating varieties of feminism out there.

“Many men gravitate toward the security and domesticity of long-term relationships. Lots of clients will re-create their primary relationship in the field that’s supposed to be their escape from the same. They orchestrate it, because when it’s not there, they ache for it. They may need to feel and act as if they’re relationally unencumbered. They may make a show of how horribly the collar chafes or how brazenly they yank it off, but they still want the tether of home. Carousing and womanizing aren’t the same without it. A leashed dog feels the frenzy for a squirrel just out of reach, then returns to a full bowl and a fleece bed that smells of himself. An unleashed dog follows a scent into new woods, wanders exhausted into an empty field, lies down in the friendless dark.”

There’s quite a lot of internalised misogyny in her descriptions of other women. Women are depicted as dumpy old women and whiney pains who deserve their husbands and boyfriends to cheat on them or they are younger, winsome and bitchy competition for male attention. It’s a misconception and a deep stereotype that seeks to divide women – as old as the hills.

There are other women too, the ones who are neither and who are just relaxed, easygoing and just want the best for everyone?

There seemed to be no camraderie with other women at all, rather just a cold competitiveness and this shone through quite clearly in the book. Shane’s way of seeing sex as a teenager as firstly puppy-like and “innocent” exploration with her male friends translates very quickly into being about transactional value once she reaches college age. At this point she quits her Women’s Studies major and becomes a sex worker full time, raking in a lot of money. Something happens in between there for such a dramatic shift, but we don’t hear about it.

“The boys extended to me what the artist Hannah Black calls “the collegiate, unpretentious sexual warmth” characteristic of gay men that’s usually withheld between straight men and women. And in doing so, they invited me inside a sort of hedonistic Eden, a space of inclusion and innocence that existed alongside feral vulgarity. How miraculous that I’d been a part of that. Their generosity gave me something far more precious than sexual pleasure, and I would yearn to feel it again for the rest of my life.”

I don’t quite know what I was expecting from this book but it felt like there were large parts of Shane’s life that were omitted. She doesn’t quite get as vulnerable and personal as I would have hoped. Instead, there’s a lot of descriptions of all the men she’s shagged – these parts are vividly beautiful and we see the men in all of their vulnerability, loneliness and humanness in how they long to connect with her. We also get to see the ugly side of men too, the way they try all kinds of possessiveness, control, threats and stalking.

I just wished she would have extended that level of vulnerability to her reflections on own evolving self in her writing. Her relationship with ‘Roger’ a wealthy senior man who treats her exceedingly well in terms of manners, polite requests for sex and giving her financial freedom. These parts of the memoir started off compelling, but became repetitive and tiring after a while.

It is clear that despite all of the talk about only caring about money, Shane deeply desires connection, intimacy and long-lasting love. Towards the end of the book in a rather rushed conclusion, she finds her soulmate and she knows right away that he’s the one. This is a pleasing conclusion to the book, and you feel very happy for her but this felt like a sudden event tacked onto the end rather than a gradual evolution of inner life. As a result this is a patchy, inconsistent memoir.

Content Catnip

The Firsts of 2026 enthüllen meine ersten gelesenen und rezensierten Bücher. Lass dich von meinen Leseerlebnissen inspirieren. #BookTag #TheFirstof2026

https://theartofreading.de/the-firsts-of-2026-book-tag/

#BookThreads #booksky 💙📚 #bookstodon TCL's #SomethingDifferent Sunday #28 - New Year's Bookish Resolutions! No bread, pottery, or stained glass today. Instead I bring you a new #Booktag, brought to you by @TStrawberryPost - a new blog for me! Only 13 questions, about our 2026 reading goals.

http://tcl-bookreviews.com/2026/02/01/tcls-somethingdifferent-sunday-28-new-years-bookish-resolutions/

#BookThreads #booksky 💙📚 #bookstodon TCL's 7th My Life in Books (aka Life According to Literature) Tag - 2025 Version - on my #bookblog here. Thanks to @annabookbel and @bookdout for these fun prompts/questions and this lovely yearly #booktag!

http://tcl-bookreviews.com/2026/01/15/tcls-7th-my-life-in-books-aka-life-according-to-literature-tag-2025-version/

Book Review: Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings by Joy Harjo

Harjo’s poetry is deeply rooted in her ancestral roots and the intergenerational trauma of colonisation. Her collection is a profound meditation on the lives, struggles, and resilience of all indigenous peoples.

Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

Genre: Poetry, Non-fiction, Native American Literature

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Review in one word: Transcendental

Joy Harjo is an internationally renowned poet, writer, and musician of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. She served three terms as the 23rd United States Poet Laureate. Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings is a powerful and essential collection of poems and prose from Harjo.

The book is not a linear narrative but a lyrical journey that weaves together personal memory, ancestral stories, and sharp political commentary to paint a vivid picture of Indigenous existence in the modern world.

The trajectory of the collection follows the profound cycles of life, loss, and survival. Harjo begins by emphasising the importance of passing down traditions from one generation to the next, a sacred act of cultural preservation.

Poems and short vignettes traverse time and geography, drawing on imagery and stories from ancestral knowing in North America, from Alaska to Hawaii to her own Cherokee lands.

The centrepiece poem, from which the collection takes its title, serves as a powerful axis for the book’s themes. In it, Harjo contrasts the worldviews of Native peoples and white Americans, particularly in their approaches to conflict, land, and spirituality.

Harjo critiques a colonising mindset that would build a casino on sacred land, contrasting it with the Indigenous preference for resolving conflict and expressing identity through art, music, poetry, and oral tradition.

There’s a lot of thematic focus on the Blues as a musical style and lifestyle and her prose is incantatory, blending the rhythms of traditional song and oral storytelling.

I loved this collection of elegiac and hopeful poems there is so much affinity I feel for her and her experiences seeing as I am indigenous as well. This is a moving and essential collection of poetry. Harjo is a genius for the ages!

Content Catnip

#AmericanHistory #art #BookReview #bookTag #BookReview #books #Colonisation #History #indigenous #JoyHarjo #JoyHarjo #literature #Native #nature #nonFiction #Philosophy #poems #poetry #storyteller #storytelling

Der Herbst ist da, die Spooky Season, der goldene Herbst und damit auch der #herbstbooktag.

10 buchige Fragen mit Herbstthema habe ich mit Manga, Comics und Romanen beantwortet.

https://youtu.be/h3Ec3Jmxg5A?si=aA3pgi1kzzK1QgFD

#booktag