just finished The Women by Shannon Waite and… wow. raw, messy, brilliant. 39 stories that peel back the layers of girlhood and womanhood—nothing sugar-coated, everything felt. if you like sharp, unflinching writing about growing up, this one cuts deep.

Shannon Waite’s The Women is like being handed a rusted key to a locked cabinet in your own memory, one filled with the jagged, painful, private parts of girlhood you forgot you remembered. It’s unflinching, sometimes brutal, often strange, and always electric.

Each story is a little grenade. Thirty-nine brief, blistering vignettes, some as short as a paragraph, others a few pages, each packed with raw honesty, blood-and-bone truths, and sentences that slice you open when you least expect it. The characters are messy, mean, vulnerable, and so real you feel like you know them (or were them). They are the girls who grew up behind the bleachers, in the nurse’s office, under streetlights, in church pews and detention halls. And Waite does not look away from their beauty or their damage.

There’s a defiant, punk lit energy to Waite’s writing. It reminded me of early Mary Gaitskill or Jenny Zhang, blurring fiction and confession, girlhood and womanhood, danger and desire. And yet, it feels completely its own thing: nonlinear, lyrical, and quietly revolutionary.

This isn’t a collection you breeze through. You flinch, pause, reread, wince, maybe laugh (a little too loudly), and feel exposed. But by the end, you’re not the same.

Waite has written something bold and brilliant. A love letter to the girls who never learned how to behave. A battle cry for women trying to survive their own softness and sharpness.

My Highest Recommendation.

A book that climbs into the skin of girl/womanhood and lets you walk around in it. Sharp, witty, and never had the pages dragging. A razor-tongued combination of short stories varying in length, detailing the knitty gritty, dark, and dirty. A great extension to the Raising Women interactive novel, or perfectly digestible by itself. A relatively quick read with a good, fast pace that draws you through the chapters, featuring lots of smaller stories that pack a punch. A reflection of your hidden thoughts, feelings, and anxieties, reflected in the characters. The tone of the novel pivots perfectly in line with the theme and pace of each short story and adds to the immersive nature of the stories. A collection of short stories that acts as a reminder to us of the universal nature of women's lives.

I loved Raising Women and the only critique I had was that the format made it difficult for much character development. This was before I knew The Women was coming, so to say I was eagerly anticipating this would be an understatement. I love Waite’s decision to tell these stories in a series of vignettes from differing times throughout the characters lives. The structure of both stories compliment each other extremely well. I especially enjoyed learning more about Roman, from the beginning that character intrigued me. Being able to dive deeper into each character and their past traumas really helps set the scene for why they may have made some of the choices they (could have) made in the other novel. That being said, this is a short story collection that stands extremely well on its own. If you haven’t read Raising Women, this is still a hauntingly beautiful trip into the traumatizing thing that is growing up female.