Banshee

By: Rachel DeWoskin

Narrated by: Hillary Huber

In Banshee, Samantha Baxter - wife, mother, poetry professor - learns she has breast cancer and then ruins her own life.

Tumbling through a catastrophic midlife crisis, she gives herself permission to partake in behaviors she's observed in her male colleagues, including having an affair with a student her daughter's age, ranting at board meetings, and telling her poetry students what she really thinks of their work.

Underneath biting, witty narration lurks a childish, confused, and unrealized adult woman hell-bent on destroying her relationships and professional life, all within the span of a few weeks.

Part comedy, part tragedy, Banshee dramatizes the emotions that lie behind our inhibitions - and the consequences of unleashing them.

©2019 Rachel DeWoskin (P)2019 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

If you like constant internal dialogue...

then this is the book for you. There’s not much of a plot. Instead, there’s constant internal dialogue from the main character. I found it frustrating. The main character did come alive for me, although I found her irritating.

Sorry but no way can I recommend this book

I was hoping for an adult book, not a horny teenage university professor who can’t deal with what ever life throws at her... or a email version of a mid life crisis without the bike...
I couldn’t get through even half of the book...
this was the worst book this summer so far... I tried, I really tried to get through it...

Morbid

I didn't hear any humor. Just morbid description of surgery and death in the first chapter. The second she has a homosexual relationship with her student and complains about her husband. Enough for me.

Misogyny Flipped on its Head

DeWoskin has given us a laugh out loud, gorgeously written exploration of the thoughts and feelings of a midlife crisis. Flipping misogyny on its head, she unhesitantly and fearlessly peels back the inner monologue of her protagonist, a female professor married for nearly 20 years diagnosed with breast cancer who decides to throw all caution, and all thoughts of doing what is right, to the wind. In a scorched earth, unapologetic “I’m going to open all your eyes” style, I dare say she has written the novel Philip Roth couldn’t, a book both timely and ahead of its time that not only lays open and bare the duality of human conscience where we fall, rise, and dwell between sin and grace but also calls out society’s double standards of how men vs women are supposed to act in marriage and academia. It is not a permission slip or an advocacy piece. It is a book about consequences and decisions, the what if’s of love and lust, the bond of marriage, the difficulties of marriage, the challenge of our own mortality, the march of time, the beauty of youth; and how all that comes together and plays out whether in our loins, in our heads, or in our beds. Banshee is a deep dive into these voices, all of our voices, post #MeToo, post Philip Roth, post Junot Diaz, a true and free airing out into the open. DeWoskin is a master of metaphor and simile. She is a poet of language. She has cracked society’s misogynist and homophobic vaunted hiding places and accomplished what so many writers can never do and that is write a middle section that is a “sheer f*cking” brilliant ride. Banshee is a brave book, an achievement to be admired and followed, with some of the singular best lines I have ever read in literature. Thank you Rachel for the trail you have blazed and the experience you have given this male writer.