I had hopes of liking Lady Macbeth, purportedly a feminist retelling of the Shakespearean play. However, from the start, it seems doomed to failure. Rather than being a strong female, Lady Macbeth is a whiny seventeen-year-old French girl (Roscille) brought to Scotland to marry Macbeth. The beginning is slow, packing a lot of Roscille’s backstory as she rides in a carriage toward her marriage, rather than diving straight into the story. Roscille has a reputation of being able to control men with her gaze and must wear a veil in the presence of men to keep from ensorcelling them.
Roscille fears her wedding night with her lord, so she concocts three favors he must fulfill before he can consummate the union. First, she wants a gold and ruby necklace. As he has no gold, Macbeth plots to take over the nearby Cawdor and take its gold. This conquering stimulates Macbeth’s ambition. While he’s conquering neighbors and plotting to become king, she convinces the guards of one of his guests to kill the guest and then kill each other.
The only man immune to her gaze is Lisander, a dragon shapeshifter who becomes her lover and eventually embodies the prophecy that Macbeth shall not be killed by any man of woman born or until the wood comes high upon the hill. At this point, I lost my ability to suspend disbelief.
Roscille and Macbeth don’t work together at all. He remains brutal, eventually putting her in the bowels of the castle with the three witches (one of whom is his ex-wife) to join their ranks. Other than the witches, there are only two other women in the book, both servants, one the woman who accompanied Roscille in the carriage (sent away by Macbeth) and another she rescues from being sent to a convent because of her promiscuous behavior. The men are all caricatures, unstintingly barbarous and sadistic (except Lisander). The book seems poorly researched with errors such as confusing Gaelic and Scots, having Æthelstan, the English king, appear, despite being dead for a hundred years, a poor sense of Scottish geography and topography. Overall, disappointing.
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Lady Macbeth (Del Ray, August 13, 2024) is available through:
Your local independent bookseller | Amazon | Barnes & Noble
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