Ava Reid does it again! The prose, the setting, the romance, EVERYTHING. Amazing! Full review will be posted to Goodreads on release!

This was quite a letdown for me as I so love Macbeth and the poetic prose of Ava Reid. I expected a lyrical, cutting and powerful retelling. What I got was lyrical but somehow lackluster while being extremely brutal. I will start with what I did appreciate. The bleak atmosphere was relentless and gothic. I loved the historical detail and especially the etymological attention throughout the novel. Reading it on my Kindle allowed me to look up words, places and people. Some were not even in Wikipedia, and I had to do a deep dive to find out more. This shows the research Reid put into this work. This lifted my rating.

The three witches were brilliant and by far my favorite part of the story. Eerie, unsettling and then later human, comedic, redeeming. I would read a book centered on them, for sure.

Now on to my critique. I found this overall to be overwritten and heavy handed with its feminist message of men are bad simple minded creatures and women are trapped. Set in the 900s it’s certainly fair to paint an extremely male controlled world, but the excessive commentary had me rolling my eyes far too often. It took away from what felt like a beautiful fairytale in the beginning - strong in metaphor, imagery and symbolism. However, every time I thought I understood what type of story I was reading I was proven wrong. 65% of the way in I had accepted that I was reading a dark historical fiction with some leaning into folklore of the time. Nope, suddenly I was to believe dragons and unicorns were absolutely real. Until that point the “magic” was more myth and superstition - fear, not reality.

So then it was a fantasy - except it wasn’t. It returned to brutal gothic drear. Then the ending surged back into high fantasy….. While I like good genre blurring, this did not work and did not feel believable. Just frustrating.

With the exception of Roscille I found most characters to be quite flat. Even her love interest as the redeeming male character was uncomplicated (save for his transformation which I will call more of an attention grab for marketing than character development…trying to be vague to not spoil the plot). Maybe this is back to the simple fairytale formatting, an attempt to make the characters archetypal - which I could be on board with if it was more consistent. The characters I did find compelling were brushed over. What a tale we could have received if we learned more about the backstory of the witches, the handmaids, Macbeth himself. But this was a world mostly devoid of females except for our heroine… a confused 17-year-old far from the fierce middle aged Lady Macbeth Shakespeare envisioned.

Taking away my comparison to the source material, I would still be underwhelmed and ultimately annoyed with how the ending didn’t match with the rest of the book. It was not convincing. So much potential here. I wanted to love it. I tried hard to love it. I could not.

Thank goodness for the absolutely gorgeous prose. Many lines I reread out loud just for their beauty or striking pain. For that reason, and for the clearly academic mind of the author, I may read more from Ava Reid. I’ve heard good things about Juniper and Thorn and ASID.

This was so great. I was not familiar with Shakespeare’s Macbeth. However, I think that just kind of made it better. I know it will be different than Shakespeare’s so that bothers you probably not for you. The writing was great. I personally did not like the main character, but I was still rooting for her.

"Lady Macbeth" was one of my most anticipated releases of 2024. After thoroughly enjoying "A Study in Drowning" by the same author, I had high hopes for "Lady Macbeth". Unfortunately, this time my expectations weren't met.

"Lady Macbeth" is a retelling of Shakespeare’s classic play "Macbeth". Given its marketing as a feminist retelling, I was particularly intrigued by Ava Reid's interpretation. However, I found this description somewhat lacking in capturing the essence of the story.

While the writing in "A Study in Drowning" was enchanting, in "Lady Macbeth" it felt overly intricate and pretentious. This created a sense of detachment that overshadowed the narrative. The book's exhaustive attention to detail, even for minor characters, made the reading experience somewhat tedious.

Moreover, I struggled to connect with any of the characters, which significantly dampened my interest in the story. Lady Macbeth herself didn’t quite embody the essence of the original character from Shakespeare’s play, which was disappointing considering my expectations for a faithful reinterpretation.

Additionally, I found the pacing of the story to be sluggish, with little significant plot development to maintain my engagement. The lyrical prose, while beautiful, contributed to the slow pace and made it challenging to immerse myself fully in the narrative. Ultimately, I had to push myself to reach the end.

"But the world is never in a woman's favor. She cannot tip the scale. The only choice is: live the same mute, unjust life you have always lived, or tear apart the world itself."

Two words: LADY ROSCILLE. I am so impressed by the way Lady Macbeth was written, explaining her desperation of power by highlighting her cleverness, her pain, and her desires. This is one of Reid's most complex and interesting protagonists yet. Not only that, the masterful writing of atmosphere, combined with her discussions of gender, marriage, power, and violence just simply tied the book together. Truly something I believe all Shakespeare fans will be proud of and enjoy.

thank you to net galley for the e-Arc!

This was one of my highly anticipated reads for 2024 and, unfortunately, it fell flat for me. Lady Macbeth is a 17 year old French girl who is doing everything in her power to escape the abuse of her husband, Macbeth. The romance in this book felt very disconnected and felt like it was a completely separate story. It seems forced and unnecessary. There was also the feeling of insta-love, which is my least favorite trope of all time.

Ava Reid’s writing is beautiful and that rings true with this book as well. She creates very atmospheric settings that have so much potential they just don’t quite hit the mark. I just wish the story would have had more depth and felt less like an angsty teen trying to be cunning and evil but screwing it up at every turn.

Book out August 6th, 2024
Thank you NetGalley and Del Ray for the advanced readers copy

Unparalleled. Evocative, dark, romantic, and a cracked mirror of what it means to be a woman. Both in what is reflective of the world we live in, and what we bury beneath. I am so thankful to have been given an opportunity yet again to receive an ARC of one of Ava Reid’s masterpieces. Lady Macbeth is undoubtably my favorite she has ever written and I am salivating for more. I cannot wait to have a physical copy in my hands. Massive thanks to Del Rey and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC of Lady Macbeth.

I really wanted to love this Lady Macbeth retelling but felt that it fell flat for me. Lady Macbeth is imagined as a 17 year old with no agency, who takes her actions to free herself from her arranged marriage. I felt that it didn't pack the punch for me that all her choices were not out of a power hungry desire but instead were to be free of the men who sought to harm her. Additionally, Reid describes all the Scottish characters in this novel as brutes, felt a bit intense for all the male Scottish characters to be grouped this way.

I think this book is going to take the very difficult to achieve prize of the worst Shakespeare retelling that I have ever read. I wasn’t a huge fan of Reid’s previous book, A Study In Drowning, but I did like her writing style and prose, and I absolutely adore Shakespeare and find Lady Macbeth to be a fascinating character, so I had to give this book a try when I saw it on NetGalley. That was probably a mistake. This review is going to effectively be a list of grievances, because I do not think that there was really anything redeeming about this book to me personally.
To start with, Lady Macbeth herself is a scheming, evil, ambitious, middle-aged, Scottish woman of unknown or unimportant physical beauty, who convinces her husband to kill the king so she can be the queen of Scotland. This is what makes her a really interesting character, but Roscille, the name given to Lady Macbeth in this novel, is not a single one of these things apart from being a woman (and word for word from the book, she is not quite a woman). Roscille is a French teenage girl who is described to be physically on par with the y/n fanfiction characters of the 2010s, from the figure that is like a childs if it weren’t for the overly large breasts (only mildly paraphrased to make it shorter– this got at least a good three paragraphs in the book), to the hair so blonde it’s practically white, to the unnatural and extremely compelling eye color (that is literally just really dark brown. She has no ambition of her own to be anything, and is the one forced to kill King Duncan (Duncane in the book), at Macbeth’s urging, although she does not even kill him, because the super strong powers that she has that make her stronger than men is literally just the power to control men. The feminism in this retelling is intensely surface-level in every way possible, which brings me to my next complaint. Instead of addressing the sexism that was in the actual play itself, this novel decided to make the sexism worse to make Roscille’s inevitable breaking out of it appear like it was more freeing, when it really didn’t do much at all. There was not much historical research that was done, as far as I can tell, and for some reason the author believed that it was possible to run an entire castle without any women at all, because the Scots were so backwards and sexist that they shunned all women entirely. On that line, this is the second book in a row that Ava Reid has written where the main character has rampant unaddressed extreme xenophobia against Scottish people specifically. Like what did the Scots ever do to you and why are you writing about Macbeth if you think that all Scottish people are ugly brutes who can do nothing besides murder and attack one another? Even the love interest, who is not Macbeth, is the only male character that we meet within the narrative who is not Scottish (he is English, which I would say is worse), and he’s the only pretty man, and can turn into a Welsh dragon, and he has negative chemistry with Roscille and the personality of a wet cardboard box. And I think those are most of my major grievances, so to prevent any further rambling, I will stop this review here.

As a teacher who enjoys leading students through “Macbeth”, I was SO thrilled to get to be an ARC reader for “Lady Macbeth”. Unfortunately, the beginning (Act I) is so difficult to get into, that had I not been approved to be an ARC reader, I would not have continued reading.

Initially, I was looking for familiar story elements, and felt lost in Act I - Macbeth and Lady Macbeth’s personalities are flipped, and honestly, the jargon is too dense for an opening of a story, or at least warrants a bit of description that is not present. Eventually, I decided to let go of my expectations that this would be similar to the original play, and wound up enjoying the rest of the book. I enjoyed the addition of magic to the story, and thought more could have been done in this regard.

My biggest complaint is that I’ve seen a lot of hype for this book being a prime example of feminine rage and it just isn’t. Lady Macbeth is a simpering, soft, lady-of-the-time, full of self doubt and panic, and even when she thinks she’s playing and winning the game, she reverts to fear and fragility.

Wow. This book is incredible.

Lady Macbeth is fantasy retelling of Shakespeare’s Macbeth & dare I say it’s better than the original?

Ava Reid is brilliant in her writing & storytelling, specifically in her writing of the main character. I am absolutely blown away. This book reads like a classic with themes that are applicable to days past and days to come.

Our Lady is fierce, strong, resilient, and cunning. The politics of this book are easy to follow, yet complex in nature. The love story is sweet & enduring. It is wonderful & I highly recommend it.

It feels very narrative, third person present tense throws me immediately, and I could not get into it. All that goes through my mind is “Who is the creepy narrator watching?” Dropping five stars, but didn’t make it past three pages.

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House for the ARC.

Harrowing and bloody. Grosteque and sublime. I'd truly expect nothing less from a novel by Ava Reid.
It's not enough to just pull back the covers on our wounds, we need to watch how they slowly fester, turning ourselves into something monstrous.

The writing is academic, a dive into history, modernizing the wordplay of Shakespeare with something feminine that is soft yet hard with a twist of fantasy. Delirious with eyes-wide-open. This isn't a catch-you-as-you-fall type of read. It's more of you'll feel every hit of the stairs on the way down. And once you pick yourself back up the rage empties itself in a satisfied guttural cry.

I will be forever in awe of Ava Reid’s writing and storytelling, Lady Macbeth is just another example of this.

This story was everything I could have asked for, it was dark and haunting filled with pain and desire. Ava Reid has taken the character of Lady Macbeth and given her a story full of depth and feminine rage mixed with magic and mystery.

Roscille, our Lady Macbeth; death-touched. Poison-eyed. Witch-kissed. You witness Macbeth's cruelty and blood-lust (this book is not for the faint of heart) which is also richly intertwined with betrayal and vengeance. There is a theme of loneliness throughout the story, Roscilles journey of discovering her own identity after being forced into this marriage with Macbeth. She is just a girl trying to survive cruelty.

The atmosphere Ava Reid has created is spellbinding, you can vividly see the painting of the dreary setting and knit together with enchanting Scottish folklore. I adored the magic aspect of this story. I don’t want to spoil too much but witches, curses and dragons is all you need to know.

Apart from the cruelty shown, there is passion-filled romance blooming throughout the story (don’t worry, not with Macbeth). It's filled with lust, passion and the gentle act of kindness and forgiveness.

Overall this story was utterly breathtaking and some of Ava Reids best work yet. I am beyond excited for everyone to get a chance to read this book & I hope you all love it as much as I did.

What a stunning retelling! I really enjoyed Ava Reid's dive into MacBeth. I felt transported by the prose with her stunning use of language and description. At first, I thought the feminine rage was overwhelming but while I was reading I began to feel like it was incredibly accurate, and if I was in the same position I would have similar thoughts and feelings. I thought the story remarkable for how fresh it felt when it is a retelling of one of the most famous plays in existence. What a fabulous job by Ava Reid, I will definitely be recommending this to everyone I know.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC of this book!

Unfortunately, I had to DNF at around 10%. Usually, I give books at least a few chapters before calling it quits, but the writing style and complexity of the language just wasn’t for me. While I loved A Study in Drowning, the prose and language in this was too convoluted for my liking. I’m sure this book will appeal to many, but it just didn’t appeal to my style of reading.

I love Ava Reid so this was a must read for me. A few things: this diverges quite a bit from the Scottish play and I felt that Lady Macbeths agency was taken and given in equal measure. It's certainly gothic and atmospheric; no woman around at all The pacing could've been better bc it felt both long and short. It's a fascinating character study, definitely fantasy and a lot of brutal violence.

I dont know why, but I was NOT expecting this to be an adult book. Check the trigger warnings cuz this book is BRUTAL. I love that Ava Reid was able to keep basically all of the same characters and themes from the original Macbeth, but also went so much deeper than the that. She got to the root of the characters and exactly how they ended up the way that they are. Seeing women survive times of insane misogyny is both terrifying and impowering.

Also, Ava Reid's ability to make me LOVE a character that we barely ever see?? unmatched.

I will be screaming about this book on every rooftop and buying every special edition possible.

Thank you Netgalley and Del Rey for allowing me to read and review Lady Macbeth. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

There may be slight spoilers ahead!

"Roscille wonders how many of them have imagined the sword-thrust that will make them widows. She wonders how many smiled at the thought."

Ava Reid's Lady Macbeth is a reimagined tale of the classic Shakespearean story of the victimized Macbeth and his villainess wife Lady Macbeth but with a gothic fantasy spin. I've only ever read Juniper and Thorn. I have her other two books currently on my TBR. Ava Reid is known for her dark storytelling which Lady Macbeth is definitely a twisted tale. Reid's writing is unforgiving and she does not hold anything back. I appreciate authors who write stories that can make people feel uncomfortable, and Lady Macbeth might do that.

"We can never be truly apart then; if we are each other's ghosts."

Ava Reid categorized Lady Macbeth to be a monster romance and in some ways it is but as a whole I don't believe so depending on what you count as being a "monster romance". There is a love interest in Lisander, who has a well-kept secret about his lineage, and is an enemy to Macbeth's reign. Both Lisander and Roscille are drawn to each other like a moth to flame but their romance felt rushed for the amount of times they spoke.

"If she cannot have safety, if she cannot have love, at least she can have this. Vengeance."

To be frank, most of the book felt rushed, unexplored, and a little under-developed. With Lady Macbeth being a highly anticipated read for me, I was slightly disappointed with the length as it restricts the reader from learning more about the witches, Lady Macbeth, Lisander's curse, and the building of their romantic relationship. I was captivated by Reid's lyrical and compelling way with words. I think the story is too short for what it is and I could have read a hundred or so more pages.

Release date: August 6th.
I may add more to my review later.

Dark and lyrical, this book joins the CIRCEs in a feminist retelling sphere that takes ownership over bad deeds in literature. I liked Reid's interpretation of both the Shakespeare source text, as well as other historical documents about the time period and versions of this story. The dragon myth interwoven felt as necessary as breath, and despite having studied the text in college and master's program classrooms, I still wondered where Reid would take us with the lady's tale. Lovely, bloody, and recommended.