I think this excellent review offers some of my thoughts, but I might add more to this review after the book has settled in my head. Still, though, this book felt as if it were missing some fundamental something.
I know Valente is known for her writing, but something about it just felt odd to me more than anything else. This book is written in a manner that is way too complex for the source material, which is essentially comic books.
My biggest problem here was the writing style. And unfortunately, as someone with not much knowledge of the specific source material - although plenty of knowledge of these tropes - I had trouble with a few stories that had ambiguous references and therefore lost the full message. It’s a story of solidarity between women, but in the end, a bit of an inconsistent one - this story’s main strength is as a parody. It’s following a bunch of women in a literal deadtown, all becoming friends with each other and telling their own stories. Inspired by the trope of Women in Refrigerators, aka Women Getting Fridged For Manpain, The Refrigerator Monologues satirizes sexist tropes within media representation.Īnd just like the trope itself, this book is weird as hell. The site was created for comic book fans and lists examples of the comic book trope whereby female characters are injured, killed, or depowered as a plot device, and seeks to analyze why these plot devices are used disproportionately on female characters. According to Wikipedia, Simone created the “Women in Refrigerators” website in 1999. “The Refrigerator Monologues” is dedicated to Gail Simone who was fired from writing the DC comic “Bat Girl” thus diminishing the active number of female writes in the comic industry. The reader should be somewhat familiar with comics and the tropes utilized in this totally original and unique book. Valente has gone to great lengths to give her characters creative and original names, and powers, yet the origins of the names leak through. The female hero’s gather together and aptly name themselves “The Hell Hath Club”, which becomes the framing sequence for the individual cleverly written stories. They tell their stories from the afterlife in a place called “Deadtown”.
Valente states in the afterword to her new book of stories concerning the wives and girlfriends of superhero’s, titled “The Refrigerator Monologues”, pertains to the untimely deaths bestowed on those ladies.Įmphasizing the total lack of respect for the female character roles in comics in general, Valente compares this book to her personal version of “The Vagina Monologues” for the comic industry.Īll of the various female narrators in “The Refrigerator Monologues” are dead.
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