Jo (The Book Geek)'s Reviews > I Am an Emotional Creature

This is a difficult book for me to review, mainly because I've read Eve Ensler's works a couple of times before and I've enjoyed them, and secondly, because I have a lot of respect for her as an individual. This particular book I failed to resonate with, and the main reason for that is how it was executed and the lack of content.

While some of the information contained here was ultimately true, it wasn't written in a way that I think would be very accessible for young girls. It's easy to throw words on to a page, but elaborating on them is what girls might need. Maybe an interview here and there would have been beneficial to this book, instead of attempting to fictionalise what a female Chinese factory worker might feel.

'The Vagina Monologues' was written to eradicate the stigma associated with using the word vagina, and it was aimed at women everywhere, from all walks of life. This book is said to be aimed at young girls, but personally I wouldn't give this to a girl below 15/16 years of age. I found some of the content highly stigmatised, especially in regards to men,so in a way, I thought this was quite damaging for girls to be reading.

Ensler wrote all of these poems and stories about young girls all over the world from her perspective, so they all unfortunately sounded very similar. Not all girls feel exactly the same way about everything that happens to them in life.

Also, the structure of this was rather irritating and somewhat depressing;

when a book
is
laid out
like this
I begin to
climb the walls

This book could have been so much more than it was, and if Ensler had included more voices from around the world, different and hopefully valuable perspectives for us to read, I would probably have been able to recommend it to people.