by Clarissa Pinkola Estes
First sentence: “Wildlife and the Wild Woman are both endangered species.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Content: There’s frank talk about bodies and sex. I have no idea where this would be (Self-help, maybe?) if the bookstore had it.

I came across this book in an article for the last class I took, and I thought it sounded interesting.

How it came off 25 years after publication was a lot of heteronormative, new-agey, psychobabble nonsense. Estes takes a fairy tale — generally from another culture, but we’ll give her mid-90s self a pass on that — and then deconstructs it to help explain why society has trapped the Wild Woman inside of women and how she needs to be freed. Now don’t get me wrong: I agree with the premise. Society HAS trapped women into gender roles and norms that are not just harmful for women but for men as well. However, I’m not sure that this was the best way to communicate it. Well, maybe it was in 1995. But now it just seemed very very dated.

And so I ended up skimming and skipping a lot. I did enjoy her tales; some of them I had heard before but many I had not. But the rest of it? Well, there are always self help books about finding your inner wildness. Maybe read one of those instead.