bri's Reviews > The Spirit Bares Its Teeth

Thank you to the publisher for an ARC in exchange for an honest review!

They must have convinced themselves they would never rot in the same dirt we do.

The Spirit Bares Its Teeth has carved me wide open and laid me bare, leaving me to gather up the pieces and stitch myself back together.

I can't remember the last time I read a book with this much ferocity but perhaps it would have been disrespectful to approach reading such a ferocious book in any other way. Through a gothic historical medical horror, White cleanly dissects the topic of “female hysteria,” making an incision right at the intersection of ableism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia in the body of capitalist patriarchy. This book is bleeding with precise commentary, certain to leave its readers with the scars of its haunting prose and unflinching rage.

I wouldn't say I'm usually one for medical horror, and upon hearing that the level of this book's gore includes a graphic, on-page, at-home Cesarian abortion, I wasn't sure that this story would be for me. But amidst all the guts and gore, this book has a beautiful beating heart. One filled with hope and solidarity. And it feels weird to say I found safety and comfort in this story–that it felt like a huge hug and that it held me in its blood-soaked arms and said: "I see you, and you've never been alone," but it did. Though I guess that's the point of this tale: that no matter what the world tries to tell you, you are perfect and whole and worthy of love, even if you've spent your whole life trying to amputate parts of yourself in order to fit an image the world has told you to be. And that sometimes, you'll find the truest reflection of yourself in the most unlikely places.

This book is for the rabbit-hearted kids who are sick of either having to tear themselves down or tear down the people around them in order to survive. For the kids who are sick of walking on broken glass, but are ready to rip those shards out of their feet and wield them like a knife instead. And for the kids who never got the chance to.

If Andrew Joseph White wasn't a favorite author of mine before this, he certainly is now.

CW: extensive medical gore, medical experimentation, eye horror, sexual assault/rape (implied, on-page), sexual harassment, abortion, forced institutionalization, confinement, conversion therapy, sexism, transphobia, deadnaming/misgendering, pedophilia, forced marriage character death, dead body, death of mother (past), death of father, abusive parents emesis, miscarriage (mention)