This is such an important and well written book, it should be required reading. Rachel Vorona Cote makes very clear how and why women came to be "too much" and it is infuriating. Highly recommend.

If I had to describe this book in one sentence, I would say that it’s a feminist memoir interwoven with the Victorian narratives that continue to shape women’s lives today.

Vorona Cote argued her premise very thoroughly by giving example after example of how women’s behavior and bodies are still judged through the lens of Victorian constraints. I think she shines most when delving into examples of Victorian literature and making connections between how characters either subvert or work within the boundaries placed on women, and how women still have to navigate those same boundaries today.

This was a really mixed bag for me. The Victorian era isn't something I'm well-versed in, so some of that went over my head, but it's also a lot more memoir than I expected. I enjoyed parts of it, but I was definitely ready to be done before this book was.

DNF’ed

I thought that the flow of this book was very odd. I couldn't get into the first few chapters.

I was engrossed at the start of this book by Cote's writing style and critical points she presented in the introduction. She was fired up and I was fired up! As I read on, however, I was disgruntled with how this original academic work transformed into a tell-all memoir.

Each chapter discussed a different type of "too muchness" women have been and still are prejudiced against for possessing. Too old, too loud, too crazy, too curvy, etc. These chapters provide examples of each of these "faults" in the form of Cote's experience, Victorian era manner manuals and literature, and evidence from today's popular culture. The anecdotes used to describe these "too muchnesses" were not divided fairly; it was way more about Cote than anything else. Even the Victorian era stuff seemed minuscule in comparison to the musings on Britney Spears and Lana Del Rey.

Furthermore, I didn't see a clear thesis. Cote started out strong but definitely lost me in the meanderings of her own life. There are some great lines I've highlighted and saved in my notebooks to use in my own wonderings and research, but it's far from something I'd recommend others take time to read from cover to cover.

Unfortunately, this book itself proved “too much” for me. Academic and overly detailed, I didn’t really get to the big ideas that other reviewers did. Ultimately, I bailed on this one.

Rachel wrote a meaningful memoir blended with brilliant and vivacious literary criticism. Perfect for any feminist who was deeply rooted in Victorian literature as a youth or teen, TOO MUCH offers readers a way to assess the rules and expectations one has internalized and ways to cope with your feelings about them.

I wanted to love this book so much. Judging by the synopsis, I expected to tear through it at breakneck speed—everything about Too Much lined up with my personal reading interests. Unfortunately, I just didn’t feel like the right kind of reader for this book... this one struck me as a graduate-student-level assessment, which rendered it as a massive slog for me personally. Even for this practiced hobbyist reader (and college grad), this book’s overtly academic language proved “too much” for me (see what I did there?), and it often felt as if the author made this decision intentionally just to make the text feel more sophisticated and high-brow, while greatly taking away from its readability factor. Every page was DENSELY (and I mean densely) packed with SAT vocab, honestly to the point where it felt like the author could well have just been right-clicking and synonym-fishing all her adjectives and verbs in Microsoft Word, cherry-picking the most obscure diction available. All that said, it was difficult to digest, but not due to the actual messaging of the book. I also think that the author could have benefitted to provide greater context and detail for her source material. She touches on a LOT of classic literature, but for folks like me who are not versed in Victorian lit it felt like too much of this was written in shorthand with the assumption that readers would already have a certain level of background knowledge with the source texts. I think the most interesting portion of this book (content-wise) was the discussion about romantic female friendships in Victorian England- hidden yet “unthreatening” back then, but under more heavy scrutiny in our modern day. She also had a lot of valuable insights into the Victorian concepts of body image and living in a fat body, a topic that’s been on my mind a lot lately after reading Hunger by Roxane Gay.

Too Much: How Victorian Constraints Still Bind Women Today provides many examples of Victorian classics and culture and compares them to the ways that women are still confined today. Rachel Vorona Cote looks at both the authors and works that represented the norms of the Victorian era, as well as the authors that sought to break them. Each chapter features an emotion or characteristic that women are often shunned for demonstrating “too much” of, and features portions of the author’s own life, memoir-style, to further emphasize those constraints in her life.

When I originally saw this book, I saw it as a perfect fit for me. I enjoy Victorian literature, but I specifically enjoy the work of the Brontes, who I found were breaking the norm when it came to gender roles – and all things I feel we still have to deal with to this day! But of course, the characters they wrote could only go so far, as the Victorian era had many limits for them. So the link between authors like the Brontes and feminism has been on my mind for a while, and when I saw this book, I had to read it immediately. Sadly, it did not live up to my expectations.

Between the full title of Too Much and its synopsis, I expected two things – examples of constraints on Victorian women, and examples of those same constraints on women today. And while the book technically does this, it’s organized in such a way that the whole concept of the book is lost. Additionally, the content and tone of this book change so frequently. Sometimes it’s a memoir, sometimes it’s critiquing literature with sophisticated dialogue, and sometimes it’s extremely casual. All of these things on their own are fine, but put together it makes for a very confusing execution.

I also wasn’t expecting this book to be so memoir-heavy – in fact, I wasn’t expecting a memoir element to this at all. And I don’t want to say that her experiences weren’t valuable to the overarching themes of this book, because they were. What I did find, though, is that with everything else happening in this book, having a memoir element on top of it all added to the confusion of the whole concept. For each chapter’s subject matter, the book was covering Victorian (or other) literature and traditions, covering modern cultural examples, and discussing the author’s life. And considering the whole point of this book, I really hate to say that it was “too much” because the subject matter here is important and should be discussed. However, there was so much information here that it took away from what the book was supposed to be about.

Additionally, there were quite a few portions of this book that stood out to me in a way that removed me from the book. For one, many of the “modern” cultural examples discussed here are not so modern compared to the book’s publication date. A lot of the references are about 10-15 years old. Which isn’t “old” per se, but old enough where I’d need a recap. But the book doesn’t really do that. For instance, one of the cultural references it uses as an example is the movie Bridesmaids. But the author discusses this movie assuming that every reader must have seen this movie. Luckily, all of the information I could ever need or want is at my fingertips, but I’ve also never read a non-fiction book like this where they didn’t explain the premise or assume that I must know what they’re talking about. I could understand a lack of description with more recent examples, but not so much with slightly older ones for things many readers might not be aware of. Or maybe I’m the only person who doesn’t watch rom-coms. Who knows? That honestly could just be me.

Another part of this book that threw me for a loop was her critique of Alice in Wonderland, which is mentioned twice. In the scene where Alice’s body continually grows, shrinks, and becomes unbalanced, the author cites this as a commentary on the female body and others’ expectations of it. Additionally, when Alice causes a flood from crying too much, the author cites this as women being too emotional.

Alice is a book that was heavily referenced while taking courses for my Computer Science degree, and my professors have studied this book heavily. In fact, many of the discrete mathematics problems we solved in our coursework were Carroll’s own. So for this scene in particular, as well as Alice crying “too much” and the other proportional issues throughout the novel, were actually introduced to me as Carroll’s critique of symbolic algebra and some of the absurdities that come into play while working on these problems. The author’s interpretations certainly can and do co-exist with the mathematical satire in the book, but the way this was written to me read like this was the only meaning behind these scenes, and that made me lose my focus. And this, again, is something I’d see in other non-fiction books where you would get the full background, and all of the angles before honing in on one interpretation. Like I said, I completely understand what the author is saying here and I agree with it, but the fact that a major element of the book is missing from that discussion made me feel less confident about what I was reading. Or maybe I’m just really passionate about math and don’t like rom-coms.

In any case, Too Much was not a flat one star for me because the author is really passionate about Victorian literature and feminism, and her intent and emotion shows it. Additionally, there were plenty of literary works I was introduced to here that I want to check out after reading this. Overall, I just found that this book would have carried so much more power if it was more organized and the overall concept of this book condensed. With all of the books, cultural examples, and stories of the author’s life, this could have been a whole series of books, because the author has so much that she can share on this subject. But it was a lot for one book, and I think it would have read much better if this were organized better, and with fewer, more developed examples in place of many underdeveloped ones. I do wish I had liked this one more, but I’m happy to see that this is a subject matter that people are talking about (and that authors are writing books about).

I wasn't nearly as inspired as I expected to be by the title of the book. I found many of the arguments and examples confusing.

Definitely one of my most disappointing reads of this year. (TW: self harm is mentioned in this review). Also should mention that I fully read about 65% of this, and then skimmed the last few chapters.

This book begins with a ton of promise, and hits a lot of my interests--the Victorians, and an exploration of how women are expected to shrink themselves to fit society? Great! An author's note about how Victorian canon is almost always viewed with a cisgender, white, heterosexual lens? Fantastic! Discussion of Jane Eyre in the first chapter? Sign me up!

Unfortunately, this book also suffers from the following:

1) A lack of good editing (the word "titular" is used Way Too Much, enough that it was noticeable and distracting).

2) Not knowing what tone to take. Does the author want it to be an academic text? A memoir? Literary criticism? The writing veers from overly formal literary analysis, to overly candid memoir. The author continually talks about being a "Too Much" woman herself, and illustrates this with personal anecdotes throughout each chapter. If she had decided to write a straight up memoir that also talked about her relationship to Victorian literature throughout, it would have worked much better. Instead, I found the different writing styles to be jarring and almost obnoxious. If you're going to write literary analysis or cultural criticism, great, but being formal in one sentence and referring to a character as "simply fucking insufferable" in the next isn't it.

3) The "literary analysis" and "cultural criticism" in this book is surface level, and simply regurgitates points that other authors have made. It reads like a rehash of Anne Helen Petersen's (fantastic) book "Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman," only it also suffers from "shiny object syndrome" and cannot focus on one piece of media long enough for there to be any new original thoughts or depth. There are occasional lines or moments where I was "YES, you are on to something," only for the author to abruptly jerk away and jump to something else entirely. It relies far too much on secondary sources, and personal anecdotes for there to be any new ideas.

4) This book is supposed to be about how the Victorian era shaped societal expectations of women, and how these expectations still dictate women's lives today. In some ways, this thesis statement is far too broad, as there's no clear line drawn between the Victorian era and present day in any of the chapters. The author again jumps all over the place. She devotes the first ten pages of one chapter to Jane Austen, who isn't even a Victorian writer, and another entire chapter to L.M. Montgomery's works, who was writing in the early to mid 20th century. The author's attempts to connect these works to 20th and 21st century pop culture also feels scattered and undeveloped, and sometimes baffling. In one chapter, on mental illness, the author writes: "Sylvia Plath has become a Lana Del Rey-esque icon, fucked up, but beautiful and glamorous." I stared at this sentence for a full minute, oddly offended, but not entirely sure why. Honestly, this describes my emotions towards this book in general.

5) The author also talks a great deal of her intent for this book to be "inclusive" and to "draw in experiences of queer people and people of color." Fantastic! However, her attempts to do this feel like an afterthought, or like she's searching for woke brownie points. For example, in a chapter about unruly bodies, she puts in a paragraph about the policing of black women's hair, which feels deeply undeveloped, and like an afterthought. The same thing happens when in the mental illness chapter, she tosses in a statistic about black women being more likely to be incarcerated. This also goes back to what kind of book the author wants this to be--cultural criticism, memoir, or academic literary analysis? The choices she makes, and the sheer amount of topics she brings up in each chapter makes it feel frenetic and underdeveloped, which defeats the purpose of wanting to draw in other experiences and give queer people and people of color their due.

6) There is a chapter that comes far too close to romanticizing self harm and cutting for my taste. (and trigger warnings would have been helpful)

I do think this would have been a better book if there had been better editing, and if the author had chosen to write this as more of a memoir of her time in academia, while also exploring the question of societal expectations placed on women. I feel torn between wanting to admire the author for her candidness and bravery in approaching difficult subjects (self-harm, depression, infidelity) but also feeling deeply irritated with the melodramatic, self conscious prose that at times felt like a bad journal entry meant for the author's eyes only. This is also a subject that the author obviously feels deeply protective of--she refers to herself as a "Too Much" woman almost as much as she refers to "the titular character"--but because the themes are so personal, the writing almost seems like she's trying to make excuses for her own behavior rather than write a work of cultural criticism. If she had detached herself more from the analysis and focused on her subjects, or if she had fully written a personal memoir, this could have been a great book. Instead, there are lots of half formed ideas, textual analysis that reads like a freshman English paper, a failure to create an engaging intersectional work, and entirely Too Much oversharing.

It's hard to walk a fine line between having a personality and being "too much", especially if you're a woman. You're supposed to laugh at jokes, but if those laughs turn into snorts you're out. You should definitely enjoy cooking and baking and fine cuisine, but don't stuff your mouth. And please only let an elegant tear drop down your cheek, not the torrents of tears and snot that might show actual emotion. Since I feel this balance I knew Too Much would be the book for me. Also, how gorgeous is this cover! Thanks to Grand Central Publishing and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

In many ways this book is a bit of an inspiration for someone like myself. I like to consider myself a bit of a pseudo-academic, especially since I'm currently nowhere near a university or academia in general. I love reading into texts, analyzing them, figuring out what role they play in our lives today and how they reflect our lives then. Too Much does a lot of that, looking into various Victorian texts, both literary and non-literary, to find out why we still seem to hold true to certain ideas and ideals that were popular then. Aside from this, it is also a blend of research and memoir/autobiography. Carmen Maria Machado released her masterful autobiography, In the Dream House, earlier this year, laying bare how we look at ourselves dependent on the stories we tell and have access to. Vorona Cote does this to a certain extent as well and although her story is perhaps more familiar to many than Machado's, Too Much only occasionally hits similar high notes.

Unfortunately, Too Much left me a little confused at times. The subtitle as well as the introduction heavily prioritize the book's link to Victorian constraints and literature specifically and yet much of the book focuses on different eras and sources, whether it is Jane Austen, pop idols from the 2000s or the movie Heavenly Creatures. Vorona Cote's idea of 'too muchness' never quite crystallized enough for me to take it beyond a hashtag. It's something all women will be able to identify with, but aside from celebrating it there doesn't seem to be a lot we can do with it. Similarly, a lot of the analysis in Too Much is recognizable because it is no longer outrageous. Britney Spears' breakdown in 2008 is no longer a punchline, Angel Clare is hated by everyone and Ramona beloved. Somehow I wish Too Much went further than it does, either dedicating completely to what its subtitle suggests or to being an autobiography.

Rachel Vorona Cote is very passionate and almost uncomfortably honest throughout Too Much. She shares ruthlessly from her past, whether it is her own infidelity or the horrors of being a teenager at a preppy school. Because of this honesty, a trigger warning does also need to accompany this book as one of the chapters, entitled 'Cut', deals with self-harming. It is one of the most autobiographical chapters in Too Much and at times I found myself cringing at what almost felt like the glorification of self-harming. Too Much can be read in such a way that it gives women the go-ahead to be as selfish and self-destructive as they desire. I do not believe this is what Vorona Cote intended. Rather she means to point out that the restrictions we face leave us constantly wondering who we are, second-guessing and repressing ourselves. This is a good message and something to be aware of, but it is also not new. On top of that, books like Too Much sometimes walk a fine line between celebrating women who stand out and are Othered and shaming women who are seen as more compliant. It is a difficult balance and I don't know whether it has been successfully struck by an author yet. At times Vorona Cote veers rather too much towards the latter.

Overall, I was fascinated by Too Much until I ended up questioning it. I wish that it had gone further in truly assessing what lies behind the restricted behavior and the way it affects different women. Instead it left me with many questions that I'm sure I will be finding answers for over the years.

Part-literary analysis, part-memoir, Too Much is not just an important examination of difficult women but also a vulnerable work of self-reflection, the latter of which I wasn't expecting but ultimately enriched the entire text for me. Cote's impressive prose makes this a fulfilling read that acknowledges there is nothing inherently wrong about being "too much" anything.

I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

Rachel Vorona Cote is a good writer, with a compelling voice. I got sucked into the first couple of essays here, particularly the one in which she dove into her childhood, inherited traits from her mother, and her adolescent affections for L.M. Nothing's beloved heroines, Anne and Emily. But overall, I felt like there is very little argument made here, or at least that the clear thesis the back cover suggests is not half as clear once the book is opened. The author mixes Victorian ideaology, modern culture (films like Frances Ha and Brave are discussed at length, though both were released in 2012,and while not exactly dated, one does wonder whether there were more current examples available to support the author's argument), and stories from her personal life and it all feels a bit out of focus and muddled. A promising concept, but the execution was a bit lacking for me.

“When we live authentically, Too Much women risk the litany of assessments recounted to me, a liturgy of intended shame, although we strive to embrace it: loud, shrieky, shouty, shrill, intimidating, difficult, noisy, obnoxious, scary, strident, bitchy, bossy, pushy, not normal, intense, inappropriately lacking in deference, gobby, mouthy, unladylike, too friendly, too talkative, too emotional, too outspoken, too direct, too rash, too passionate, too much.”

Too Much is a triumphant celebration of difficult and thorny women, demanding and impatient girl children, and temperamental females with heady, unbridled emotions and complicated eccentricities. Vorona Cote hugs the line of erudite and her text will certainly appeal more to readers with English Literature degrees or those whose interests gravitate towards that arena, as those without a background in or specific interest in this discipline may find the text tedious at times. However, her passion for women’s stories, women’s deviances, and women’s intensities make Too Much a love letter to the wild in all of us.

“In nearly every corner of our lives, we are reminded that the world was neither built for our welfare nor our benefit.”

Vorona Cote considers many of the major players of both Victorian and modern literature, touching on the Brontës, George Eliot, Lewis Carroll, Charles Dickens, Christina Rossetti, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Elizabeth Gaskell, while also addressing a few of the shining stars of classic and well-known literature who boldly bucked the norm, such as Pippi Longstocking, Ramona Quimby, and the beloved heroines of novels by Jane Austen. Too Much addresses mental illness, fatness and body image, perceptions of beauty, sexuality, ageism, self-harm, and the role of white privilege, among other topics, in all of these as she travels through literary and pop culture history.

Three quarters of the way through Too Much we take a fairly heavy-handed turn into memoir territory that is relatively distracting as her personal narrative takes the driver’s seat, but Vorona Cote mostly succeeds at drawing potent connections between her own experiences and the overarching focus of her text, working to link her personal life to those of Victorian literary characters. I found a few of her analyses to be somewhat hyperbolized, particularly her tendency to project onto close relationships between female characters and what may be construed by some readers as a glorification of mental illness. However, Vorona Cote’s stark vulnerability, vast understanding of Victorian literary history, and insistence that our too-muchness is a characteristic worth being owned made this read an overall success for me.

I love the concept of this book, and the opening is incredibly insightful. The chapters "Chatterbox" and "Plus" were definitely the highlights, but some of the chapters seemed shoehorned in. "Crazy" contains a long discussion of the Britney Spears meltdown in 2006 that is... weirdly analytical of an actual person that (I'm assuming) the author doesn't know, and out of place in a book where most of the examples are drawn from Victorian literature. "Cheat," on the other hand, veers wildly into the opposite direction, reading more as an excerpt of a memoir that doesn't really fit into the theory of <em>too much-ness</em>. Overall, there are some really brilliant insights in here, and I think with a suitably vicious editor this could be a tight 90-page treatise with an extremely persuasive narrative.

Like a lot of social commentary books, this one was a heavy read. Too Much is a discussion of how women have always been frowned on for experiencing any "excess" of emotion. Rachel Vorona Cote explores this excess largely through the analysis of Victorian literature and combines it with personal anecdotes that will sound familiar to many of her readers. It's an eloquent and engaging criticism of the world we are "too much" for and I highly recommend it.

Included in SBTB's monthly New Releases post, which highlights upcoming books for the next month: https://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/2020/02/februarys-new-releases-part-two/

This book is very near and dear to my heart. Rachel Vorona Cote talks about “Too Muchness” which I’m sure many of you are familiar with: too loud, too large, too imaginative, too sexual, too irreverent, too independent, or you take up too much space.

The author examines how the Too Muchness of women in Victorian were treated and then ties it to how women are still limited, stifled, exiled, caged, and bound by those philosophies today.

Each chapter is about a different type of Too Muchness and embedded in these themes are beautiful, deeply vulnerable personal stories.

I savored this book. Rachel Vorona Cote wields her academic prowess and sharp eye with an incredible clarity and sturdiness. The English major inside delighted in taking a deeper look at the fictional women who inhabit our cultural landscape and discovering new ways to understand them (and myself). (There is a chapter that includes Alice in Wonderland that is so insightful.)

Full disclosure: The author is a friend of mine, but that doesn’t change the fact that I adored this book.

Thank you to NetGalley and Grand Central Publishing for the eARC in exchange for an honest review.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for the eARC of this book I received in exchange for an honest review.

I really liked this book. My favorite thing about it was that, despite its academic content, it was very readable. There was a lot of voice in the way the author talked about this idea of being "too much." I am currently trying to think of ways I could use it in Fall '20.